CIOs, Senior IT Executives Rank Red Hat Industry's Most Valued Vendor; Company Outscores All Vendors in CIO Insight Study for Second Consecutive Year.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that for the second consecutive year, Ziff Davis' CIO Insight Research Study has named Red Hat the leader in vendor value and overall satisfaction according to US senior-level IT executives surveyed. The study can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/sec/CIO_research5_1205.pdf.

Red Hat topped the list of global vendors with an overall rating of 84.2 percent, indicating the total percentage of respondents that ranked the company's open source solutions as "excellent" or "good." In addition, Red Hat was ranked number one for "meeting expectations for lowering costs" and number one in "meeting ROI expectations." The company's closest competitors, Sun Microsystems and Novell, were ranked 15 and 22 respectively.

CIO Insight's 2005 Vendor Value and Satisfaction study surveyed 884 senior-level US technology executives, asking each respondent to rate their IT vendors as "excellent," "good," "fair" and "poor" on seven key criteria including increasing revenues, lowering business or IT costs, solving business problems and meeting ROI expectations. The study was conducted in conjunction with Equation Research, LLC of Estes Park, Colo.

"At Red Hat, customer feedback is the most important measure of our success," said Joanne Rohde, executive vice president of Worldwide Operations at Red Hat. "For the second consecutive year, CIOs and other high-level IT executives have named Red Hat their most valued IT vendor. The results indicate that customers are finding our broad portfolio of open source technologies and services to be the most compelling and valued in the market. "

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

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