Red Hat ISV Partner Program Experiences Record Growth of 122% in 2006; Makes Plans for 2007.

With An Emphasis on Healthcare, Telecommunications and Financial Services, the Red Hat Partner Ecosystem Expands In 2006; Plan For 2007 To Attract Partners Compatible with Virtualization and SOA Strategies

SAN FRANCISCO -- Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced that the Red Hat ISV Partner Program has experienced record growth, posting an increase in certified software partners by 122 percent in the last six months, April through October 2006. The Company targeted application providers in industry verticals where open source adoption is happening rapidly: healthcare, telecommunications and financial services. While continuing the drive for reliable solutions in these vertical areas, Red Hat will work to identify partners that specialize in solutions complementary to its virtualization and service-oriented architecture strategies in 2007.

For over 25 years, InterSystems Corporation has been a technology innovation leader in database and integration software, serving the financial services and healthcare sectors. "While Linux has been a key market for our CachE[umlaut] post-relational database for a long time, we've seen a significant shift over the last year -- particularly among leading-edge financial services customers -- toward Linux deployments for core enterprise applications with hundreds or thousands of servers," said Paul Grabscheid, Vice President of Strategic Planning, InterSystems Corporation. "Our partnership with Red Hat enables us to ensure the highest levels of scalability and reliability with a Linux offering from the market leader."

In addition to targeting strategic industries, Red Hat has expanded the variety of benefits and services available to ISV ecosystem partners. With a number of new marketing and technical benefits included in the partner program, the ISV community has responded favorably, further contributing to growth.

"Demand for open source is happening in virtually all industry sectors around the world, but in 2006, healthcare, telecommunications and financial services emerged as the top industries for enterprise adoption of open source," said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Red Hat. "The next areas for real value delivery for the customers will be virtualization as part of the service-oriented architecture. We are already collaborating with customers to complement our concentration on these technologies. The net will be a complete, reliable, high-value solution for the customer."

"Virtualization and service-oriented architecture are two of the key business productivity opportunities in the market today," said Tony Iams, Vice President for System Software Research, Ideas International, Inc. "The open source model and ecosystem are well suited for helping global enterprises and vertical industries to realize immense benefits from these new industry drivers."

The Red Hat ISV Partner Program continues to attract industry-leading solution providers whose applications support the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. The goal of the program has been to ensure that there are as many choices as possible for customers building architectures based on open source. Early partners in the program included IBM, Oracle and Computer Associates. Many existing partners have worked over time to ensure that entire lines of enterprise applications support Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been a strategic platform for CA, our customers and our channel partners for years," said Alan Nugent, Executive Vice President and CTO, CA. "We continue to work with Red Hat and support this high-value operating system across our product lines -- so that enterprise IT organizations can effectively leverage it as part of their overall business technology strategies."

"Responding to customer demand, Reuters and Red Hat partnered in 2001 to port our leading market data system, RMDS, and application programming interfaces to Linux," said Jack Gidding, Vice President of Information Management Solutions, Reuters. "By supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we provided our customers with more choice, high performance and an excellent price performance ratio. The latest release, RMDS 6, takes performance on Linux to new levels."

"VMware and Red Hat have worked together over time to ensure that customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in VMware environments get a fully supported and certified stack across both vendors," said Brian Byun, Vice President of Global Partners and Solutions, VMware. "As demand has increased over the last five years, we've partnered with Red Hat to answer customer demand by having all VMware products fully supported for Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

"Working in close collaboration, EMC and Red Hat continue to see further growth and adoption of Linux by customers in a broad range of industries," said Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Global Alliances, EMC. "We work to provide the highest levels of Linux interoperability with EMC networked storage systems and software through the EMC E-Lab Tested Program, which is the most comprehensive interoperability and qualification program in the industry. EMC is committed to providing enterprise-level joint support along with the appropriate resources and rigorous testing infrastructure that enables customers to build and deliver enterprise-class open source solutions."

For a full list of applications that support Red Hat Enterprise Linux and more information on the Red Hat ISV Partner Program, please visit http://www.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs and other senior-level IT executives have ranked Red Hat as the industry's most valued vendor for two consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high-quality, low-cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides an operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, along with applications, management, and middleware solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat is accelerating the shift to service-oriented architectures and enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, secure open source platform. 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 a focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

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