Red Hat, the world's most successful open source company, today celebrates the 10th anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL was introduced in May 2002 and it has changed the software industry with the first-ever open source software subscription business, spurring the adoption of Linux across the enterprise. Red Hat has become a role model for open source companies.

"Red Hat is thankful to the worldwide Linux community and all our partners, and is proud to recognize the achievements we’ve made with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat. “Building on the last decade, today Red Hat enables the most advanced IT environments in organizations that offer products and services that truly enhance the way we work and live. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great example of making disruptive technology an industry standard."

Achievements:
Launching the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) program in 1997, a valuable offering for training IT staff on Linux, that helped spread the use of open source in businesses by giving Red Hat customers access to a growing pool of resources with proven skills;

Shifted business focus to the enterprise IT user by shipping an enterprise-grade Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system in May 2002;

Introduction of the first successful open source software subscription business model focusing on reliability and stability, attracting leading hardware and software partners to port to Red Hat Enterprise Linux;

Merged Red Hat Linux and the Fedora Linux Project to create the Fedora Project, a community collaboration of Red Hat employees and volunteers and a powerful incubator of open source technologies for Red Hat Enterprise Linux;

Development of a 2-20X price/performance  increase for enterprise customers with significant cost savings, record-setting performance benchmarks, usage in high-performing super-computers, and integration of security and virtualization technologies; and

Established Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the premier open source operating system for software and hardware certification and support with more than 9,000 applications and 1,400 ISVs and more than 3,000 certified hardware platforms today, ranging from servers and workstations to storage and mainframes certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Red Hat changed the way customers purchase software, pioneering community-driven product development and offering an open source subscription model,” said Doug Oathout, vice president, Alliances and Channel Partner Marketing, Enterprise Group, HP. “Our most recent collaboration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant Gen8, provides unparalleled levels of scalability and performance, and showcases our commitment to innovation and the open-source ecosystem.'