It’s been a long and cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere at RedHat’s headquarters, but we have plenty of events scheduled to help heat up for spring. From HiMSS in Atlanta, to Qcon in London, you can find RedHat all over the world this month. Be sure to stop by our booth to learn more about our latest offerings, or to learn more about RedHat Summit and JBoss World 2010.

Looking for information about RedHat Summit and JBoss World? Click here.

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Global

Registration for RedHat Summit and JBoss World 2010 in Boston, Massachusetts will open March 15. For more information, visit www.theredhatsummit.com

Click here for a full list of RedHat Webinars.
Looking for information about RedHat Government Solutions? Click here.
Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

RedHat will be located in Hospitality Suite MP21 at HiMSS in Atlanta, Georgia, March 1-4, 2010 . We will be running multiple demos and have representatives from RedHat there to speak about what RedHat can do for you. RedHat will also be the sponsor of the Senior IT Executive Exchange Breakfast, taking place Thursday, March 4th, from 7:30-8:15am. To learn more and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Gold sponsor of the upcoming CIO Executive Leadership Roundtable, March 3, 2010, in Houston, Texas. We will be located in booth #3 on the show floor. This half-day event is designed exclusively for CEOs, CXOs and CIOs/IT leaders from the greater Houston area. To learn more and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Silver sponsor of this year’s XChange Solution Provider Event, March 8-11, 2010. We will be showcasing our products and solutions in booth #84 at the event. XChange brings together a powerful community of technology builders, sellers and buyers that come together to share best practices, network with peers and gain insights from industry editors and analysts with the goal of improving bottom line growth. To learn more and to register, click here.

RedHat is a diamond sponsor of the Open Source Business Conference, March 17-18, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Come see RedHat’s President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, deliver the opening keynote address on March 17 from 9-9:30 a.m. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat’s Bob McWhirter, consulting software engineer, will be keynoting at this year’s Java Symposium in Las Vegas, Nevada. Bob will be speaking on the Cloud Computing Continuum on Wednesday, March 17th from 2:35-3:20pm. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat’s JBoss is a Gold sponsor of the 2010 EclipseCon, taking place in the Santa Clara Convention Center, March 22-25, 2010. We will have a number of speaking sessions at the event including presentations from Nick Boldt, senior software engineer; Max Andersen, principal software engineer; John Graham, manager, software engineering; and others, as well as a booth showcasing a number of our JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions and developer tools. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is an enhanced silver sponsor at SAP’s Administration and Infrastructure 2010 conference in Orlando, Fl, to be held March 23-26, 2010. The event is aimed at IT groups that manage, customize, deploy and support SAP® systems. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

RedHat is a Technology Sponsor at Qcon March 10-12, 2010 in London. Come listen to Mark Little, chief technologist, Middleware at RedHat, deliver a presentation entitled, “Transactions: Over Used or Just Misunderstood?” For more information and to register, click here.

Going to IDC’s SOA and Beyond Conference in London, March 24, 2010? Listen to Steve Gaines, RedHat senior partner manager, Jboss, deliver a presentation on RedHat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on RedHat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

For more information on RedHat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

For more information on RedHat’s events in Latin America, click here.

Interested in speaking to RedHat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com

Recently the Japanese magazine, Nikkei Computer conducted an online survey of its readers, comprised mainly of system integrator architects, IT consultants and systems engineers (please see, “Nikkei Computer” February 3^rd edition 2010, P.60). In this survey(#12) respondents were asked to rank their interactions with vendors on application servers. RedHat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform debuted in the #3 position in its first time being included in the survey. Additionally, in the survey, 41% of respondents answered “yes” when asked if they plan to increase their business with RedHat going forward. RedHat was the only North American-based company ranked in the top three.

We believe that customers continue to benefit from the innovation of community versions, but we also see more customers looking to the enterprise-class platforms to run mission-critical deployments and to our expanding partner ecosystem to help them deploy strategic solutions, carve out costs and improve productivity and reliability.

Other recent awards and honors for JBoss Enterprise Middleware include;

• Forrester Consulting TEI Study where a customer’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployment was able to save the organization millions of dollars,
• Velocity Partners survey where customers rated JBoss Enterprise Middleware above competitors in customer satisfaction, and finally
• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in Gartner, Inc.’s “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers”.

We believe that these areas of recognition demonstrate that JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions are helping customers drive real value across the IT enterprise. You can read recent customers case studies at our Customer Reference website. Companies like, ResMed and MGI Financial are just a few of the organizations that are taking advantage of enterprise class open source middleware from RedHat.

To learn more about how open source middleware is helping drive the strategic vision of enterprise IT, join us at JBoss World at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, June 22-25, 2010 ). Additionally, for information on how to become a JBoss Certified Partner, click here.

Next month I’ll be delivering the keynote address at the annual Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco. I have participated in every OSBC since joining RedHat and I look forward to continuing discussions surrounding open source, technology and business opportunities at this year’s event.

For the second year in a row, I also have the honor of sitting on a panel at OSBC with fellow open source CEOs where the discussion will center on the future of open source. You can help shape this discussion by taking a few minutes to complete the “Future of Open Source” survey available here. Want to hear more about cloud computing, how open source thrived during the economic downturn or promising new open source projects? Take the survey and determine the focus areas for the CEO panel. If you’re in San Francisco, be sure to swing by OSBC to hear the discussion live on Wednesday, March 17.

March 25, 2010 will mark 17 years since the founding of ACC Corporation, a catalog business that sold Linux and Unix software accessories and books and distributed a magazine called New York UNIX. ACC Corporation would eventually become RedHat. The company has evolved over the years from one small office in North Carolina to an S&P 500 business serving enterprise customers across the globe. Open source also continues to evolve. The opportunity for open source is promising and I’m excited to see the Future of Open Source survey results. Help drive the OSBC Future of Open Source panel discussion by taking the survey before Wednesday, March 3.

Last week, eWEEK Labs published their picks for the top 25 technologies that changed the decade. They judged their selections on the impact the technologies had on the past 10 years, while also considering the affect that these technologies will have on the future of IT. Among the winners – which included innovative technologies such as the iPhone, the Blackberry, Blade Servers and Bluetooth – was our leading operating platform, RedHat Enterprise Linux. eWeek noted,

Coming into the decade, Linux was already a hot commodity, but it wasn’t until RedHat launched the buttoned-down and subscription-priced Enterprise variant of its Linux distribution that Linux was truly ready — both in terms of roadmap stability and of business model — to truly storm the enterprise.

Today, RedHat Enterprise Linux remains a market leader in Linux, offering our enterprise customers the latest technology advances, hardware enablement, bug fixes and updates through our reliable subscription model. We aim to release updates to customers regularly to offer them access to new technology to help them deliver high performance, scalability, reliability and more for their businesses. Most recently, RedHat delivered the beta availability for the upcoming RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5 release, with hardware, virtualization and interoperability developments.

Over the years since RedHat Enterprise Linux debuted to the market, it has been recognized through a number of industry awards for its overall technology leadership as well as for its next-generation features, such as its integrated virtualization technology and green IT-enabling functionality. Here are some recent RedHat Enterprise Linux awards highlights:

• Network Products Guide 2009 Product Innovation Awards, Operating Systems category winner
• Datamation 2008 and 2009 Product of the Year Awards, Enterprise Linux category winner
• SYS-CON Virtualization Conference & Expo Show Awards
  • Best Overall Virtualization Product winner
  • Best Server Virtualization Solution winner
  • Best Greener IT Product winner
• Network World 2008 Greenest Operating System winner
• 2008 SIIA CODiE Awards, Best Open Source Solution

For more information about RedHat Enterprise Linux, visit our product page.

Since U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn into office, open government initiatives have gained much-deserved focus in Washington. From the Obama Administration’s transparency memo and Whitehouse.gov’s migration to open source to the DoD’s well-received open source memo and the White House’s Open Government Directive, 2009 was certainly a banner year for open source momentum in government.

RedHat helped drive that momentum, in part through our ongoing work with Open Source for America. Open Source for America, which launched in July 2009 with 60 founding members, now boasts more than 1,600 members from businesses, associations, non-governmental organizations, communities, and academic/research organizations. Following the release of the December 8th Directive requiring all U.S. federal agencies to develop Open Government Plans, Open Source for America developed a series of recommendations for essential elements that belong in every Open Government Plan.

As recognition for the momentum Open Source for America has achieved, RedHat’s own Gunnar Hellekson, lead architect for RedHat Government, was named to the 2010 Fed 100 list. Sponsored by Federal Computer Week magazine, the Fed 100 honors 100 individuals whose vision, passion, risk-taking and pioneering spirit have impacted and transformed federal IT. The list includes professionals from government, industry and academia whose efforts have affected change, progress and efficiency in determining how the federal government acquires, develops and manages IT. Winners are nominated by Federal Computer Week readers and selected by an independent panel of judges. Gunnar was specifically recognized for his ongoing work furthering open government initiatives, including Open Source for America.

Join us in congratulating Gunnar for this achievement, and also in our continued work with Open Source for America. Check out Gunnar’s commentary on what the Open Government Directive means for open source here.

Interested in the intersection of open source and government and how government can cultivate communities? Join the conversation on opensource.com.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 has been in broad use by enterprise customers since it was released in March 2007. The industry, however, doesn’t stand still. Even as RedHat remains committed to a long, stable lifecycle, which our customers count upon, we continue to add enhancements to the Enterprise Linux 5 platform. RedHat has announced the beta availability of the fifth update to RedHat Enterprise Linux 5: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5.

Each update to the RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 platform has marked a milestone in platform or feature enablement, and today’s beta availability is no different. With the goal of optimizing our customers’ ability to get the most from a new generation of hardware, this update is designed to support some of the new platforms and processors anticipated for 2010. We expect the new platforms to leverage RedHat’s history in scalable performance with new levels of core counts, memory and I/O, offering users a very dense and scalable platform balanced for performance across many workload types. To increase the reliability of these systems, RedHat supports Intel’s expanded machine check architecture, CPU fail-over and memory sparing.

RedHat also continues to make enhancements to our virtualization platform. New to the RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5 release is support for greater guest density, meaning that more virtual machines can be supported on each physical server. Our internal testing to date has shown that this release can support significantly more virtual guests than other virtualization products. The new hardware and protocols included in the beta significantly improve networking scaling by providing direct access from the guest to the network.

This fifth update to the RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 platform also introduces improved interoperability with Microsoft Windows 7 with an update to Samba. This extends the Active Directory integration to better map users and groups on RedHat Enterprise Linux systems and simplifies managing filesystems across platforms.

An important feature of any RedHat Enterprise Linux update is that kernel and user application programming interfaces (APIs) remain unchanged, ensuring RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 applications do not need to be rebuilt or re-certified. The unchanged kernel and user APIs also extend to virtualized environments: with a fully integrated hypervisor, the application binary interface (ABI) consistency offered by RedHat Enterprise Linux means that applications certified to run on RedHat Enterprise Linux on physical machines are also certified when run on virtual machines. With this, the portfolio of thousands of certified applications for RedHat Enterprise Linux applies to both environments.

All subscribing RedHat customers can download the RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5 beta via RedHat Network today.

Full details of today’s beta update can be found in the release notes.

Getting involved

We maintain a public mailing list for communication during Beta. You are welcome to subscribe to these lists and keep up-to-date with our latest developments. Announcements for RedHat Enterprise Linux are posted to rhelv5-announce. Public discussions on the Beta occur on rhelv5-beta-list.

Last year was an unprecedented period for businesses, governments and individuals. The economic crisis compelled organizations worldwide to examine essential operations and how to most effectively achieve strategic goals. Along the way, many organizations re-evaluated how they have been running their operations and IT functions or building and integrating applications, including their use of traditional proprietary middleware.

We believe that this re-evaluation contributed to the continued adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware throughout the enterprise that we saw in 2009. What was different and significant last year when compared to other years, is that more organizations made large strategic commitments to open source middleware than ever before. By choosing to standardize on JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we believe that organizations found a better way to run their business and the overall value proposition of JBoss Enterprise Middleware was a key factor in their decision to switch to open source.

Throughout 2009 RedHat customers such as GEICO, Office Max, Sherwin Williams, and Allianz began using JBoss Enterprise Middleware strategically to run their business architecture. These weren’t just small development projects; these companies deployed JBoss Enterprise Middleware in projects that had a meaningful impact for both their IT functions and their businesses. These companies discovered that when compared to proprietary competitors, RedHat’s open source middleware offered a more flexible, more transparent, and easier application development platform at a lower total cost of ownership.

In 2009, we focused on initiatives to drive the pace of JBoss Enterprise Middleware adoption, here is a look back at our 2009 milestones as well as a look forward at some of the initiatives that we expect to roll out for 2010.

JBoss Open Choice–We introduced the JBoss Open Choice strategy in 2009 at JavaOne which is our strategy for delivering the next generation of application platforms. Central to the JBoss Open Choice strategy is a flexible architecture that isolates core enterprise-class operational services from the variety of container and framework choices available today. Whether you’re deploying to traditional applications or cloud-based applications, this flexibility is designed to provide application developers with the ability to choose different programming languages, frameworks, component models and APIs that best fit their needs, without sacrificing the operational performance.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0– We delivered the first application platform under the Open Choice strategy at the RedHat Summit and JBoss World in September 2009. This core middleware product represents next generation Java application platforms and we expect it to be integral to RedHat’s cloud foundation.

JEE 6.0 Leadership and New JBoss Application Server Development Projects– We introduced a new emerging project into the community – Community Version JBoss AS 6.0 which represents the next generation of application platforms based on the JEE 6.0 specification. RedHat was the Java Community Process leader on JSR 299 (Contexts and Dependency Injection), which makes lightweight deployments possible and JSR 303 (Bean Validation) which simplifies how data is validated across presentation, business and data access tiers of an Enterprise Java application. Community Version AS 6.0 is expected to become the foundation for the next release or our application platform, JBoss EAP 6.0.

Next Generation Portal–The GateIn project is the next generation of both the JBoss Portal and the eXo Portal projects. This is the first major deliverable based upon the JBoss and eXo collaboration that began earlier in 2009. Additionally, the JBoss portal community has been extended beyond the GateIn Project to include a number of strategic partnerships with Alfresco, JasperSoft and RivetLogic. Ultimately, the GateIn project is intended to form the foundation for RedHat’s future portal infrastructure products, including our upcoming JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0, and aims to enable organizations to create rich portal-based application experiences for users. JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.0 is expected to ship in 2010.

JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System–We introduced JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.0, the first comprehensive, open source rules management system.

Business Partner Adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware–2009 was also a year in which we saw greater adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware by the extended IT ecosystem. Accenture joined the RedHat family and is building practices around JBoss Enterprise Middleware and open source adoption. Independent software vendors (ISV) have recognized the wave of open source infrastructure software adoption and the ISV ecosystem around JBoss Enterprise Application Platform continues to grow.

As the economy improves and open source adoption accelerates, 2010 will be an exciting year. We expect to to focus attention on JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Cloud Computing, JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss and the Java Community and the expanding JBoss ecosystem.

It is clear to us that the next wave of open source adoption is in the middleware market – you just need to review our customer success stories to see how this trend is taking shape at RedHat. To learn more about how open source middleware is driving the strategic direction of organizations throughout the enterprise please join us at the RedHat Summit & JBoss World, June 22-25, 2010 in Boston. Click here for more details, on participation.