Registration Opens for First Red Hat Challenge

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of the first Red Hat Challenge, a contest for graduate students to formulate a group concept plan in response to a business challenge question. The Red Hat Challenge is an open invitation to create an innovative solution to a Red Hat business problem and provide the Company with original, cutting-edge ideas to shape its future business model.

All full-time and part-time students attending graduate business school or graduate design school in pursuit of a master's degree in business administration or similar degree are eligible to enter in the Red Hat Challenge. Registration for the challenge is open until March 11. Teams of three to five students attending the same school will collaborate on the business challenge question released to registrants on March 12. Each team will have a two-week period from March 12-25 to develop an innovative concept plan to deliver to Red Hat.

Over the years Red Hat has taken pride in addressing business issues with the same collaborative, creative spirit as we approach technology, said Tom Rabon, Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Red Hat. We are anticipating great ideas to surface within this competition. We are excited to be giving this excellent opportunity to graduate students around the globe who have fresh perspectives and will be instrumental in shaping the world after graduation.

Contest judging will take place in a two-part process. During the first phase, each concept plan will be reviewed and critiqued by a panel of judges who are experts in the field of business and open source technology. The top five concept plans will be selected as finalists in the second and final phase. Each group will present a 15 minute oral presentation to the panel of judges followed by a 15 minute question and answer session. In early April, the top three teams will be announced and all participants will obtain access to feedback on their concept plans.

The winning team will have the opportunity to send one team member to the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, May 9-11 to collect a grand prize of $20,000 and experience all the benefits of the Red Hat Summit's open source knowledge exchange. Winners will also be considered for prestigious Red Hat internships.

It isn't every day that students have the opportunity to present their most innovative ideas to management teams at a growing, industry-leading business, said Rabon. I encourage all eligible students to take this opportunity to work with Red Hat and gain real-world experience in business plan development.

For more information, or to submit a nomination for the Red Hat Challenge, please visit http://www.redhatchallenge.com/index.php. For more information on Red Hat, please visit 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 rank Red Hat the most valuable software vendor three years running 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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