(Raleigh, N.C.) Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the five regional winners of its annual Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) of the Year contest. Winners demonstrated hard work, expertise and innovation utilizing RHCE skills to solve complex technical problems and deliver value to their companies and institutions.

“This year’s winners have gone above and beyond the norm to deliver value to their organizations through their proven knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat technologies,” said Randy Russell, director of certification for Red Hat. “On behalf of the more than 40,000 RHCEs in 152 countries across the globe, I congratulate the 2009 RHCE of the Year winners on their achievements.”

The 2009 RHCE of the Year winners include:

* Bernard Chew, Singapore

Chew currently serves as a network administrator with muvee Technologies Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based company that produces automated video editing software. Achieving RHCE credentials has enabled Chew to accelerate his career and sharpen his Linux skills. muvee launched into the Web arena in 2007 and required a robust infrastructure to be architected in a three-month time period to meet business requirements such as reliability and scalability. As an RHCE, Chew had the necessary skills to deploy Red Hat Global File System and virtualization to meet muvee’s business goals within a short timeframe without him even needing to go on-site.

* Alex Davies, Europe

At 22 years old, Davies is the youngest IT engineer at PartyGaming, a leading online gaming company. He’s running large Web and MySQL clusters around the globe and his RHCE training has allowed Davies to identify ways to improve uptime, scalability and performance on his systems. RHCE provided a solid knowledge foundation for his current day-to-day role and has opened doors to new development opportunities.

* Sebastián Gonzalez, Latin America

Gonzalez is an infrastructure specialist for EDS, an HP company. He has utilized his RHCE skills to successfully oversee the migration of several environments running on other operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

* John Rose, North America

Rose is a systems analyst at Iowa State University and was first inspired to become a RHCE at the 2005 Red Hat Summit. Rose has utilized his RHCE skills at Iowa State University working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Proxy and Satellite servers and Red Hat Directory Server. He is also one of the leading contributors to community Red Hat Enterprise Linux support in #rhel on freenode. As a result of Rose’s increased participation in the Red Hat community, he became a contributor to the Fedora Project and serves as the Central United States Regional Ambassador for Fedora.

* Balaji Sirasani, India

Sirasani is a senior quality assurance engineer at Computer Associates and manages a lab with more than 150 machines. He has utilized his RHCE skills to easily set up Kickstart with Red Hat Network, reducing the time and effort it previously took to manually install machines.

The five winners will be honored at a special RHCE and Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) reception at the 2009 Red Hat Summit in Chicago, Sept. 1-4, 2009. For more information on the RHCE of the Year contest, visit www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/rhce/.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.