Gauri Shiv Enterprises

We’re well into 2010, and have a full schedule of events at Red Hat. Check out where you can find Red Hat this month- make sure to stop by at these events to learn more about the latest Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

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

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Red Hat will be at AFCEA West in San Diego, CA, Feb. 2–4, 2010. Come visit us at booth #1316. Co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, AFCEA West 2010 is the largest event on the West Coast for communications, electronics, intelligence, information systems, imaging, military weapon systems, aviation, shipbuilding and more. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be a Gold sponsor of The CIO Summit of America in New York City, Feb. 8, 2010. Red Hat will be located at booth #2. Lee Congdon, Vice President, IT and CIO of Red Hat, will be speaking in the Emerging Technologies track during the event. For more information on the event and how to register, click here.

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra will moderate a panel that includes Red Hat vice president of Open Source Affairs, Michael Tiemann at the Emerging Issues Forum: Enabling Creativity through Technology, Feb. 9, 2010 at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC. Listen to panelists discuss the relationships between creativity and technology and the tensions that exist between the free flow of information and ownership of ideas. Can’t make it? Tune into local channel UNC-TV for a live broadcast.

Red Hat and Intel are co-sponsoring a RISC Migration Luncheon and Workshop in Houston, TX on Feb. 9, 2010. This event targets Red Hat and partner customers, director level and below, interested in learning more about any part of the migration cycle from UNIX to Linux. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be at GTC Southwest 2010 in Austin, TX, Feb. 17-18, 2010. To learn more and to register, click here.

The North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA) will host an Emerging Technologies & Trends Series entitled “Open Source – The Source Code of Collaboration” on Feb. 18, 2010 in Durham, NC. Red Hat’s Tom Rabon, executive vice president, Corporate Affairs, will serve as a panelist exploring where North Carolina stands in the global open source picture, as well as how open source has helped CIOs save money in the down economy. To register, click here.

Headed to the Southern California Linux Expo (sCaLE 8x), Feb. 19-21, 2010 in Los Angeles, CA? The largest Linux exposition on the West Coast will feature a keynote presentation by Karsten Wade, community relations manager at Red Hat. Additional presentations will be delivered by Richard Fontana, open source licensing counsel, and Thomas Cameron, solutions architect team lead at Red Hat. For more information and to register, click here.

Visit the Red Hat booth (#67) at IBM Pulse 2010, February 21-24, at the MGM Grand Convention Center & Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. Also, make sure to see “Open Standards and Open Source in the Clouds” – this pedestal will highlight the role open standards and open source play in cloud computing, and how Red Hat Enterprise Linux with IBM Tivoli are advancing Cloud Management. For more information and to register, click here.

Attention all Red Hat Certified Engineers! Red Hat will be hosting an RHCE-only dinner Feb. 25, 2010 in Washington, DC. The event will feature numerous networking opportunities and the latest technology discussions with fellow RHCEs. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be at the California CIO Academy in Sacramento, CA, Feb. 22-23, 2010. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat is a Gold Sponsor at the PTI 2010 CIO and Leadership Summit in San Diego, CA, Feb. 23-25, 2010. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

The largest Linux community-driven show in Europe, FOSDEM 2010, Feb. 6-7, 2010 in Brussels, Belgium, will feature a distribution mini-conference, with speakers including Red Hat community architecture manager Max Spevack, Red Hat operating system engineer Harald Hoyer, and a large group of Fedora Project contributors from around the globe. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be at GSMA Mobile World Congress Feb. 15, 2010 in Barcelona Spain. Check with the Red Hat booth at the event about our hospitality suite for key customers and strategic partners at Fira de Barcelona. Attendees will be able to learn about Red Hat solutions for telecommunications, as well as view the latest JBoss Communications Platform demo. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

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

Latin America

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

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

Hi. We’re back. Well, not back exactly. We’d just like to take a minute to introduce you to somebody. Somebody that’s important to us.

opensource.com

We promised we’d let you know when we had news–and now we do. Opensource.com is our new adventure. It’s still sponsored by Red Hat, and still shining a bright light on the open source stories we’ve always sought out.

At opensource.com, we’ll be doing some things a little differently than we used to. We won’t be addressing as many technical topics–but we do hope to address more topics more often. We welcome contributions in the areas of Business, Law, Education, Government, and Life. We welcome new (and old) contributors.

You can bookmark us, or add us to your RSS feed reader. Register with the site and you can post and track comments, give a bit of a biography, and network with other contributors.

Like it? Share it. Help us spread the word through identi.ca, facebook, or twitter.

And for those of you that were fond of our video contributions? Never fear. Our crack video team is fully involved.

So give it a click. Check out the articles. Sure, it’s not the same comfy digs you’d gotten used to, but pretty soon, it’ll feel just as homey. And that’s where we’ll be, for the next while.

Red Hat Magazine enjoyed a fantastic run. It’s launched careers, ideas, and helped publish–and promote–writers we dearly know and love. It gave us experience–and information–we can take to this newer, bigger venture. And now we’ve got a new venue–and a new name–to keep doing the kind of work we love. That kind of work and more.

One thing that has changed and–we think–for the better: It’s not just Red Hat’s magazine anymore. Opensource.com belongs to everyone. It’s a conversation-starter, a place for debate, and we hope you’ll come be a part of it.

And thank you. For subscribing, for contributing, and for reading–at RHM and beyond.

On February 10, Red Hat will present its 2nd Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, a day-long virtual forum hosted by Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. Similar to our first forum, held in July 2009, the virtual event will feature a dozen half-hour, high-impact technical presentations that cover recent developments in open source cloud computing. The presentations will provide attendees with a view of the large scope of development and deployment work that is underway today, including a look into usage scenarios. As before, we hope that the forum will act as a catalyst for open source communities to work together, grow and encourage participation in the development of open source cloud computing.

The agenda for our February 10 forum is as follows:

Schedule (ET)  9:30 Introduction Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat 10:00 Boxgrinder Bob McWhirter, JBoss Fellow, Red Hat 10:30 Cloud Storage Jeff Darcy, Principal SW Engineer, Red Hat 11:00 KVM Mike Day, Chief Virtualization Architect, IBM Open Systems Development 11:30 Infinispan Manik Surtani, Principal SW Engineer, Red Hat 12:00 Spice Arnon Gilboa , Senior SW Engineer, Red Hat 12:30 User case study Nitin Narkhede, GM of Technology Strategy and Innovation, Wipro 1:00 Usage scenarios Maria Azua, Vice President, Cloud Computing Enablement, IBM 1:30 Deltacloud David Lutterkort, Principal SW Engineer, Red Hat 2:00 Hail Jeff Garzik, Principal SW Engineer, Red Hat 2:30 newScale Bill Fine, VP Products, newScale 3:00 Condor Matthew Farrellee, Senior SW Engineer, Red Hat 3:30 CoolingTower Mike Neale, Senior SW Engineer, Red Hat 4:00 Closing comments Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat

To register for the forum, visit here.

I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.

We’ve had an exciting past 12 months and here are just a few of the many things that kept Red Hat busy in 2009:

• Taking on the global recession
  Looking at Red Hat’s growth over the past several quarters, many have wondered if we were even aware that the world was in the midst of the worst recession in modern history. Red Hat has grown at double-digit rates in both revenue and headcount throughout the course of the recession. Open source appears to be thriving in a down economy and reduced IT budgets drew many CIOs to take a closer look at open source as a cost-effective solution. Customers continue to turn to Red Hat as we differentiate ourselves from the competition with high value, low cost solutions. This combination is important to customers in not only challenging times, but also robust economic environments.
• Washington embraces open source
  When Obama was sworn in last January as President of the United States, he brought the promise of an unprecedented level of openness and transparency in government. Just one day after taking office, Obama issued a transparency memo to all department heads. This memo was followed by several announcements surrounding open source and government. In October, Whitehouse.gov announced its move to Drupal for content management. A few days later, the deputy CIO for the Department of Defense issued a memo clarifying guidance on the use of open source software and its advantages. Finally, we closed out 2009 with the White House issuing its Open Government Directive in December. This move to transparency and openness in government is encouraging for open source software.
• Up in the clouds
  The use of cloud computing is growing rapidly as enterprises look to reduce costs and increase their operational flexibility. Red Hat greatly expanded its cloud initiatives in 2009 as open source emerged as a foundational element for both public and private clouds. In June, we announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, designed to simplify and expand enterprise customers’ adoption of cloud computing by allowing industry leaders to certify on Red Hat solutions. With the news, we announced that Amazon Web Services had become our first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider, building on the relationship we formed with Amazon in 2007 to offer Red Hat solutions on Amazon EC2. Soon after, we announced a cloud computing collaboration with Verizon Business as Red Hat Enterprise Linux was offered as one of the first two operating platforms available for Verizon’s new Computing as a Service (CaaS) solution.

  In July, Red Hat held its first Open Source Cloud Computing Forum to foster discussion around and advance the development of open source cloud computing technologies. The interest that the forum drew from across the industry has prompted us to continue the conversations started in July through a second Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, taking place on Wednesday, February 10, 2010.

  Also in 2009, we announced a new open source project named Deltacloud. The project aims to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate across public and private clouds. We expect that open source technologies, and specifically Red Hat solutions, will continue to provide the foundation for enterprise cloud deployments into the future.

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers hits the marketplace
  We first announced our virtualization strategy for 2009 in February, outlining plans to introduce a new virtualization portfolio based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Following a global private beta program that started in June, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers in November. The portfolio is designed to enable pervasive adoption of virtualization with a comprehensive end-to-end solution combining a standalone hypervisor and powerful virtualization management. As an alternative to expensive proprietary solutions in the marketplace, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers a cost-effective solution that can help address customers’ performance, security and scalability challenges. It also brings with it a robust ecosystem of over 3,000 certified applications that can be virtualized on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. After just a few months in the marketplace, we are seeing strong interest in our server virtualization solution. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops remains in private beta today, but stay tuned as it is expected to be made generally available in 2010.
• Middleware momentum
  Our middleware business continues to grow at a faster pace than Red Hat’s platform business, making it a growth engine for the company. Middleware momentum accelerated in 2009 with several announcements including the JBoss Open Choice application platform strategy. Announced in June, it aims to provide a single environment for deploying a variety of programming models with a common platform, making it easier to develop and deploy applications with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5, JBoss Enterprise Web Platform or JBoss Enterprise Web Server. The JBoss Open Choice strategy is intended to enable customers to embrace the latest innovations of the Java community today and represents an investment in the future as it will seek to accommodate the next wave of changes to Java for the enterprise.
• Java Leadership
  Late last year the Java Community Process (JCP) reached a significant milestone when they approved the specification for the next generation of Enterprise Java; JavaTM Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6). We believe that the approval of this specification starts a new chapter in the story of Java and we are proud to have contributed and acted in a leadership role in the formation of this standard which aims to make enterprise Java easier to use and more appealing to more developers, while still maintaining the benefits of open standards. Specifically, we support the new Web Profile and have led in the creation of two key features that are included in the Java EE 6 platform. Going forward we intend to continue our contributions to the Java development process as we strive to make this important technology platform more broadly appealing, allowing developers and our customers to benefit from a simple and standardized enterprise programming model.
• Red Hat Summit and JBoss World…the best of both worlds
  New in 2009 was the co-location of Red Hat Summit and JBoss World held last September in Chicago. The events brought together Red Hat’s full product line and we saw record attendance levels. We’re headed back to Boston for the second time this year with the 2010 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World to be held June 22-26 at the Seaport World Trade Center.
• S&P 500
  Red Hat was selected by Standard and Poor’s for including in the S&P 500 stock index in July. This is an important recognition for the global momentum of open source as Red Hat is the first pure-play open source company to join the S&P 500.
• Bilski goes Supreme
  Red Hat has long worked to address the problem that software patents pose for innovation. In October, we filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court. In the brief, Red Hat explains the practical problems of software patents to software developers. The brief, filed in the Bilski case, asks the Supreme Court to adopt the lower court’s “machine-or-transformation” test and to make clear that it excludes software from patentability.
• Channel growth
  In Red Hat’s third quarter ending Nov. 30, 2009, the channel generated 62 percent of indirect bookings, versus 59 percent in the prior quarter. The percentage of indirect bookings continues to reflect the growth of our partner ecosystem that are attracted to Red Hat’s broad portfolio of solutions to meets the varied needs of their customers. Additionally, we launched the Red Hat Catalyst Program at the Red Hat Summit which is designed to connect a community of Red Hat partners, offer marketing resources and fuel innovative solutions for customers. Through a growing partner ecosystem, continued investment in the channel and organic growth of our existing partners we plan to continue to actively work through channel routes to market in 2010 in order to drive the value of open source solutions further into the enterprise.

I don’t have a magic crystal ball to tell me what 2010 holds in store for the technology industry and Red Hat, but I look forward to the coming months and continuing to deliver for our customers as the trusted open source leader.

With the EU’s approval of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, Oracle is acquiring a major hardware and software player, and perhaps most significantly, they are now taking stewardship of the Java platform. As Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said shortly after the acquisition announcement in April of last year, Java is “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.”

We agree with Mr. Ellison’s statement; Java is one of the most important technologies developed and adopted during the past twenty years. It has fostered significant innovation throughout the IT industry and has enabled businesses and governments to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Java is larger than any single company; we are all part of Java, customers and vendors alike. Now, that Oracle has become a more significant guardian of Java, they have an opportunity to foster and expand the principles that made Java the successful platform that it is today. Oracle has an opportunity to continue to make Java stronger and viable by making the process more open and the technology more accessible.

Red Hat has played a leadership role in the Java Community Process for many years and we support making the Java process open and inclusive for all. We were one of the first companies to applaud and support Sun when they created an open source license of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) with the introduction of OpenJDK. Most recently, we led two critical specifications that were adopted as part of Java EE 6. Our goal is to make Java easier to use, more appealing to developers and beneficial to all organizations building and using software.

Over the last several years many Java Community Process (JCP) members were concerned that the future of Java was in jeopardy because the community process, under the stewardship of Sun, was not open enough. Despite the early success of the JCP, many members thought that Sun was beginning to stifle the potential of Java in order to serve its own commercial interests. Oracle along with the support of other IT vendors including Red Hat, recommended that Sun should transform the JCP into a more open and inclusive governing body, thereby securing the future and viability of Java. To that end, many recommendations were submitted to the JCP by Oracle and others. For example, Oracle submitted a public motion to the JCP Executive Committee to make changes to JCP governance. Here is what Oracle said:“It is the sense of the [JCP] Executive Committee that the JCP become an open, independent vendor-neutral Standards Organization where all members participate on a level playing field….”

In effect, Oracle was among several leaders asking Sun to make Java and the Java process more open and less prone to self-serving actions by a single vendor. Red Hat supported Oracle’s initiative to make Java inclusive and open then, and we encourage Oracle to fulfill its original proposal now. We believe that an open, independent JCP is critical for the future success of Java.

Now as the Java platform changes hands we have high hopes that Oracle will not only serve as a faithful steward of this important technology, but will also be a positive force in driving the future of Java in collaboration with the members of the JCP. Additionally, Oracle has an opportunity to grow customer and vendor adoption of Java, not by imposing undue licensing requirements that might be contrary to the principles of Java accessibility, but by making the process more open and the technology more accessible. It is no surprise that at Red Hat, one of the last truly home grown open source providers in the marketplace, open standards and an inclusive, collaborative process are one of our highest priorities.

To that end, we encourage Oracle to fulfill its opportunity to keep Java and the Java development process open, inclusive, and easily accessible to all. We encourage Oracle to ensure that Java remains open so that customers can continue to benefit from the hallmarks of a technology standard. We encourage Oracle to make sure that the Java development process is inclusive to all vendors and customers so Java can leverage ideas from the widest set of stakeholders which will benefit all equally. We encourage Oracle to fulfill their original proposal and establish an independent governance process for the JCP. And, finally, we encourage Oracle to continue the tradition of making the technology easily accessible, to vendors and customers alike, to secure its broad adoption and continued strength in the market.

To Oracle we say; congratulations on the impending close of the deal and welcome to the stewardship of “the single most important software asset” you’ve ever acquired. We look forward to working with you in your new role as you use this position to make real, positive industry change for the Java platform.

Happy New Year! We hope everyone enjoyed ringing in 2010. As we jump into the new year, check out where you can find Red Hat this month. Looking for information about Red Hat Summit and JBoss World? Click here to learn more about sponsorships at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World and the Call for Papers, open until January 22, 2010.

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Come visit Red Hat at Lotusphere, January 17-21, at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, FL. Red Hat will be at booth #403 and #404. Learn about our latest virtualization offerings and much more! For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be hosting a lunch with Intel and Dell on January 20 at Seasons 52 in Dunwoody, GA. Get the information you need to start planning a migration from RISC/UNIX. At the lunch, you will learn about proven best practices, receive an illustrative roadmap, and an efffective migration plan for you and your IT staff. For more information and to register, click here.

Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s vice president of open source affairs, will present at the University of Maryland, January 20, about improving the efficiency and capability of end-user computing platforms.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

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

Latin America

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

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

Last week our developers attended the launch of Google Web Toolkit 2.0 (GWT) at Google’s Campfire event. We were truly excited to see the level of interest and participation in the event and feel that it’s a snapshot of what is really happening with GWT both in the development community and also for enterprise application of this technology.

Not surprisingly, GWT is a technology that has influenced many areas of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware product suite as well as projects within the JBoss Community. GWT plays a part in the strategy behind our JBoss Open Choice strategy which we launched this year at JavaOne. The Open Choice strategy was driven by customer demand and a desire for customers to pick and choose the best, most productive technology yet still be able to benefit from world-class capabilities and support. We seek to deliver on this strategy through products such as the JBoss Web Framework Kit and development frameworks like Seam which provides a GWT integration layer.

Providing world class support and packaging for our customers to leverage GWT in their own applications is just the starting point. GWT also enables us to extend our capabilities to non-developers within our products. The console for the JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) utilizes GWT to assist business analysts in creating and managing SOA centric business rules across multiple enterprise applications. GWT also is leveraged within the JBoss Business Process Manager (JBPM) components to assist in the development of workflows and processes. JBPM is included in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and leveraged in features in both the JBoss SOA and Portal Platforms today.

Our efforts to embrace and in some cases extend GWT are available through several JBoss Community projects. GateIn, our new portal project includes the ability for end users to easily create GWT widgets and portlet based applications and dashboards within a secure, personalized site experience. And our latest effort, Project Errai is a new GWT based framework that provides developers federated and flexible client side integration for next generation web applications.

Looking ahead we plan to continue our collaboration with Google, both in our community efforts and in leveraging the GWT technology for our customers. Stay tuned for more information on this strategic partnership.

Several times each year, the community-driven, Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project holds the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) at locations around the globe. FUDCon brings developers, contributors, and enthusiasts together to share knowledge about and visionary planning for the next generation of open source technologies. Insightful and educational technical sessions are followed by code sprint sessions, or hackfests, where participants work together to design and create the future of the Fedora distribution and contribute to the upstream communities where open source starts. You can watch this video to see how Red Hat later harnesses that upstream work to create additional value in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This past weekend, the Fedora Project held one of its largest events ever at the York campus of Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Over 200 talented Fedora developers and contributors started off Saturday morning in the Stephen E. Quinlan Building using the BarCamp method of “unconference” organization. The crowd was so large that we overflowed into a second large lecture hall, joined by video and audio conferencing to the first. Speakers pitched their talks, and audience interest decided the final schedule for the day, which filled lecture halls and classrooms throughout the building. Often people attend professional conferences and report that their best experiences happened in the hallway, talking to peers and luminaries. Our approach to FUDCon takes this so-called “hallway track” and makes it the focal point of the event, and as a result the conference includes much richer and satisfying content. Featured FUDCon talks included:

• A demonstration and lecture on the future of desktop interaction through the GNOME Shell interface
• The state of the kernel and X graphical system projects, and what’s coming next in those upstreams
• A wide variety of information on the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and its application in Fedora infrastructure, the Fedora Community portal, and other projects
• How to develop applications for Moksha, the new open source framework for real-time web collaboration
• A full set of user- and contributor-oriented educational talks, from installing Fedora to filing better bugs or helping with design work

The full schedule of talks at FUDCon can be found here on the wiki.

Following the technical talks were two days of code sprints, or hackfests as they’re called in FUDCon parlance. Attendees applied the information they learned during the first day of technical talks, or met with developers involved in projects of interest, and sat down to solve specific issues and improve code and services in Fedora. In some cases, teams gathered to work on one project for the entire two days, as in the case of the new Fedora content management system based on Zikula. In others, they assembled and then remixed several times a day to accomplish smaller tasks in quick succession, such as focusing on quality issues such as our distribution release criteria, a media production tool for use by contributors, or the next generation of our package source management system.

FUDCon is always completely free and open to anyone to attend, and therefore attracts a broad range of contributors with different backgrounds and interests. Not only does that make for a dynamic, educational, and enjoyable event for everyone, but it also allows Fedora’s focus on innovation and relevance to bring expanded value to the community conference experience. Everyone from free software enthusiasts to people interested in the technology of future Red Hat Enterprise Linux products can benefit tremendously from that experience.

Our events calendar planning is underway for 2010 — we look forward to seeing you at a future FUDCon!

Red Hat Enterprise MRG was first released in June 2008, debuting Red Hat’s Messaging, Realtime and Grid technology offerings. In February 2009, Enterprise MRG 1.1 offered enhanced performance, clustering, security and tooling improvements, along with full support for the product’s Grid functionality. Today, Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2, which includes key performance improvements and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

With its newest release, Enterprise MRG offers customers the expanded ability to combine Messaging, Realtime and Grid technologies with the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product portfolio and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 to aggregate and build internal clouds. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, delivered to customers in September and November respectively, are Red Hat’s first products to incorporate Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2 features the following enhancements to its three major technology pieces:

1. Messaging
   In the 1.2 release, Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging includes improvements to core messaging infrastructure and performance enhancements that meet highly demanding customer requirements. With these enhancements, Enterprise MRG Messaging has achieved a number of impressive industry benchmark results, including:
   • Infiniband throughput of greater than 1.5 million reliable messages per second, per system
     MRG Messaging Infiniband Throughput. Click to enlarge.
   • Infiniband RDMA latency of under 40 microseconds, reliably acknowledged
     MRG Messaging Infiniband RDMA Latency. Click to enlarge.
   • Messaging on KVM virtualized performance of over one million messages per second throughput
   • Messaging on KVM virtualized performance of less than 200 microsecond latency, reliably acknowledged
2. Realtime
   Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2 Realtime performance enhancements improve the deterministic low latency of performance-intensive and time-critical workloads. Additionally, MRG Realtime includes a new tool, rteval, to help customers detect hardware latencies in their systems. Together with Red Hat’s intensive hardware certification program for Enterprise MRG Realtime, rteval provides customers with the tools and assurance that the entire infrastructure, from hardware to the operating system, provides optimal performance for realtime workloads.
3. Grid
   With Enterprise MRG’s Grid functionality, customers can schedule their Web server and other applications to run in distributed and cloud computing environments, and can acquire the appropriate resources to accomplish these jobs. With the 1.2 update, Enterprise MRG Grid can now support the scheduling of KVM-based virtual machines in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, and offers even greater scalability for large-scale cloud deployments.

   Enterprise MRG’s Grid technology is based on the open source Condor project, which was developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Condor 7.4, released in early November, is incorporated in Enterprise MRG 1.2, allowing customers to use some of the latest High Throughput Computing technologies available today, in a fully supported product.

Customers with an Enterprise MRG subscription automatically receive the 1.2 update today via Red Hat Network.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise MRG, visit here.

To learn more about Enterprise MRG, virtualization and cloud computing, join the Red Hat Virtual Experience online event on December 9 and attend our session on Enterprise MRG.

Yesterday I had the honor of attending President Obama’s Jobs and Economic Forum at the White House. The event gathered around 130 leaders from U.S. companies, small business, academia, labor unions and government to talk about job creation and how to jump start the economy as we look to emerge from the global economic recession.

Just this morning the Department of Labor released the latest unemployment rates for November 2009. Unemployment has ballooned to a staggering 10% in the United States. These numbers may seem daunting, and there won’t be any quick fixes, but I see a lot of opportunity for government and business to apply the core concepts of open source to help spur job creation.

Many interesting ideas were discussed for getting people back to work. Things like changes in tax policies to spur hiring, public sector investments in infrastructure, initiatives to encourage lending, and efforts to reduce uncertainty that discourage so many businesses from hiring . . . . just to name a few. These are great ideas, and I’m sure many will be acted upon to help restart job growth.

That said, as the leader of Red Hat, I think I bring a different perspective. As indicated in our recent filings, Red Hat has grown – both revenue and people – and has done so at a double digit pace in the worst recession of modern times. And so, while it is important to restart job growth in stagnant areas of the economy, I think it is just as important to look to approaches that are working to inform our country’s broader economic efforts.

So why has Red Hat thrived throughout the economic downturn? From a product-market perspective the answer is clear. This recession has been a wake-up call for many CIOs, who have been asked to deliver more value with reduced budgets, to look to open source. In the process, they’ve found that not only is open source a cost-effective solution, but it’s also secure, reliable, robust and effective in increasing productivity and meeting mission-critical IT infrastructure needs.

But why have we been able to deliver these benefits in a way that no other competitor can? The simple answer is that Red Hat has leveraged the power of participation to deliver value to our customers that no individual company has matched. The power of participation is real! From Wikipedia and the Human Genome Project to Facebook and Red Hat, many 21st century successes are built around architectures of participation. There is a growing base of academic research and empirical examples: more and more innovation will occur via open networks of participation.

In order to create and sustain real, long-term, high value jobs, we must recognize and harness the power of participation to drive innovation in this country. The suggestions I made yesterday were in the spirit of ensuring that government policies and initiatives foster participation at a national level. Specifically,

1. We must invest in education to address key skills gaps. Three things come to mind:
   • Increase our absolute investments in education and training. There are many, well established vehicles for this.
   • Leverage the power of technology to enhance the learning experience. We must seek ways to leverage the low cost and rich multimedia capabilities of technology to augment traditional education techniques and help capture the imaginations of the new generation.
   • Establish policies to accelerate broad access to learning materials and promote open collaboration among educators in creating, developing and continuously improving course materials and curricula. Explicit support for initiatives like the OpenCourseWare project would be a good start.
2. We must ensure every American has access to the World Wide Web so that each person has the opportunity to participate – be that in software, government, or society in general. Specifically,
   • We need a national broadband policy to make access ubiquitous.
   • We need to ensure equal access and use of the network, i.e. Net Neutrality.
3. We must ensure there are no artificial barriers to collaborative innovation. Specifically, we must reform the patent system as it relates to business methods and software patents. In areas where open networks of collaboration are powerful, impediments like software patents severely limit the innovation we need to create jobs.
4. We must continue to encourage a culture of transparency, openness and collaboration. Red Hat is successful because we directly leverage the knowledge and experiences of our customers and partners and contributors via the open source model. This administration is doing the same with government, and I think we should applaud their efforts. Yesterday was a great example: bringing business, labor, academic, government and non-profit leaders together is a powerful thing. I know there were a few voices who dismissed the session as a “media stunt.” At one time, there were also voices who dismissed Red Hat’s open source model as “good for hobbyists” . . . and now our products power the infrastructure of the New York Stock Exchange. We can do more when we work together. Never underestimate the power of participation.

Red Hat has built a successful, growing S&P 500 business on the power of open source, not just as a development model, but as a business and organizational model. While ours isn’t the only solution, I do believe business, government and society can unlock the value of information and create good, long-term jobs by sharing and working together.

Recently, a number of vendors have come forth stating support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and forked distributions offered by others in the industry. At Red Hat, we know that truly supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not only about support services, but also about the value of the entire Red Hat subscription.

The Red Hat subscription offers access to the latest Red Hat technology, improved features, security updates, hardware and software support and errata fixes to keep your IT infrastructure up-to-date. But, our subscription model is about more than just software. It also offers tested and quality-controlled technology, our growing ecosystem of certified hardware and software, access to Red Hat Network for easy deployment of updates, new releases as they become available over the life of the subscription, expert technical support with multiple service level options from the leader in open source and more.

These subscription benefits do not translate with third-party support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With forked distributions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s valuable hardware and software certifications do not transfer, and without owning the distribution, third parties cannot fully support it through important activities such as the timely release of patches.

We find that enterprises continue to naturally turn to Red Hat for the value of our Red Hat subscription model and support.

Recently the Java Community Process (JCP) reached a significant milestone when they approved the specification for the next generation of Enterprise Java; JSR 316: JavaTM Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6). We believe that the approval of this specification starts a new chapter in the story of Java. We are proud to have contributed and acted in a leadership role in the formation of this standard which aims to make enterprise Java easier to use and more appealing to more developers, while still maintaining the benefits of open standards. Specifically, we support the new Web Profile and have led in the creation of two key features and reference implementations that will be included in the Java EE 6 platform; JSR 299: Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE, and JSR 303: Bean Validation.

The JCP is how the Java community collaborates in driving the future of the Java platform and it is based on Java Specification Requests (JSRs) which are proposed additions to the Java platform. The adoption of both JSR 299 and 303 provide an opportunity to reiterate Red Hat’s leadership position and objective within the JCP–to simplify Java EE in order to make it more broadly appealing, allowing developers to benefit from a simple and standardized enterprise programming model. We’ve done this previously with Hibernate and Java EE 5 by reducing historical complexities associated with Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) and persistence. Our work with Java EE 6 builds upon our previous work to help Java reach a greater level of simplification and adoption

The inclusion of JSR 299 in the Java EE platform itself stems from the power and productivity benefits offered by the JBoss Seam Framework. For several years, JBoss Seam Framework has allowed our customers to build next generation Web 2.0 applications by unifying and integrating technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), Java Portlets and Business Process Management (BPM). Through Red Hat’s leadership these concepts were standardized via JSR 299 which will lead to a simpler programming model for web-based Java applications. The reference implementation of JSR 299 is called Weld.

The other specification that Red Hat led is JSR 303: Bean Validation. This is an important specification that simplifies how data is validated across presentation, business and data access tiers of an Enterprise Java application. JSR 303 represents a significant inclusion because enterprise customers often struggle with poor data quality, inconsistencies and additional maintenance burdens. JSR 303 aims to solve this common business problem through the reference implementation called, Hibernate Validator 4.

Additionally, Red Hat became early adopters of the Java EE Web Profile, which is included in the Java EE 6 platform in order to better address the needs of modern application development. The Java EE Web Profile is a subset of Enterprise Edition with a specific focus on the needs of web application developers. It provides the same portability and vendor choice as Java EE but presents a smaller learning curve for those new to the Java platform.

Red Hat’s community project, JBoss Application Server 6, is intended to be our target for implementing these Java EE 6 features and more, you can download it here. JBoss AS 6 will form the basis of our commercially supported Java application servers in the future: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform. The enhanced APIs and new technologies are designed to simplify the Java development and improve portability of Java EE applications.

We are happy to have helped lead these features within the JCP. You can learn more about Java EE 6 through these Q&A sessions with some of our lead developers, or check out a video blog of one of our lead developers discussing JSR 299.

Congratulations to the Java Community!

If there’s any way to say good bye to 2009 with a bang, then Red Hat knows how to do it! The year 2009 may be closing out in a month, but Red Hat has events to keep you busy and up-to-date on the open source world before we enter 2010. Check out where you can find us in December, and don’t forget to register for the Red Hat Virtual Experience on December 9!

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Join us Dec. 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, an event focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions, including virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk, your couch, your favorite coffee shop…anywhere you are! You can also participate in chats with business leaders, executives, key developers, customers, and strategic partners. Learn how you can scale to new demands, drive innovation, and build mission-critical applications, all without sacrificing performance, security, or functionality. For more information and to register, click here.

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions events? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Red Hat will be at booth #2829 at The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2009 in Orlando, Fla., Nov. 30- Dec. 3. I/ITSEC promotes cooperation among the armed services, industry, academia and various government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs, identification of common training issues and development of multiservice programs. For more information and to register, click here.

JBoss, by Red Hat, is a Platinum sponsor at the 2009 JSF Summit in Orlando. The event focuses on core skills, development tools, frameworks, third-party components, and the latest industry trends.  Sessions will target the needs of application developers, solution architects, and project managers. JBoss has a number of sessions at the event, including a hands on workshop hosted by Dan Allen, senior software engineer, entitled “Sinking the Business Requirements with Seam,” and sessions lead by Jay Balunas, principal software engineer, focusing on RichFaces. For more information and to register, click here.

JBoss, by Red Hat, is a silver sponsor at Gartner’s 22nd Annual Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, Dec. 7-9, 2009 in Las Vegas. We will be located in booth C, and will be running demos on JBoss SOA Platform. Make sure to stop by! To learn more and to register, click here.

Red Hat and Consolidated Resources, Inc., a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, are sponsoring the CIO Executive Leadership Forum in Boston, Dec. 10, 2009. During this evening event, IT executives will meet to discuss key success factors for helping to transform IT into a highly valued business partner within an organization. For more information and to register, click here.

Ingres, Red Hat, and Bits in Class will team up in Western Canada Dec. 2-3 for a Breakfast Roundtable “The New Economics of IT” to help organizations learn more about the benefits of proven open source technologies as cost effective alternatives to proprietary alternatives across the stack. To learn more and to register, click here.

Shawn Wells, Red Hat’s worldwide System z sales, marketing, and strategy manager, will be giving an overview of the current and future state of System z. Topics will include current Red Hat customer use cases, Shawn’s view of the current market performance, and a review of what technologies Red Hat and IBM will be incorporating into Linux on System z over the next 1-2 years. For more information, click here.

Check out FUDCon 2009 (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) in Toronto, Dec. 5-7 at the Seneca @York campus, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Participants will include Paul W. Frields, Fedora Project Leader, Max Spevack, Red Hat’s manager of Community Architecture, and 150+ developers and contributors from both Red Hat and the volunteer Fedora community.  Topics include infrastructure, feature development, community building, general management and governance, marketing, testing and QA, packaging, etc. To register for the free event, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

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

Latin America

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

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

We are in constant contact with our customers, so we frequently hear anecdotal feedback. In addition, every year we like to capture that feedback into quantifiable terms. We contract with an independent research firm, Velociti Partners, to formally survey our JBoss Enterprise Middleware customers via phone interviews and web-based surveys. The graph shows a summary or the responses for the 2009 study. You can also read the full study here. We are very proud to announce that Red Hat customers deploying JBoss Enterpirse Middleware have ranked us #1 in customer satisfaction over ten measurement categories.

In the study the respondents were either developers, IT operations, development managers or architects, and most of them also had experience deploying proprietary middleware in their environments as well as JBoss Enterprise Middleware. The goal of the survey was two fold. First, to understand the satisfaction level for Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware customers. Second, to compare ourselves to our proprietary competitors.

Notably, JBoss Enterprise Middleware customers consistently ranked us above IBM’s WebSphere and Oracle’s WebLogic in ALL of the following key areas:

• Understanding Needs
• Meeting SLAs
• Professional Service
• Knowledge Transfer
• Pricing
• Support Value
• Product Knowledge (own product and other vendor’s product)
• Multi-Channel Access
• Access to Key Staff
• Customer Loyalty

Customer satisfaction and loyalty is an important measure for any company but especially in open source, which aims to eliminate vendor lock-in, and where we must earn our customer’s business every year because of the nature of the subscription model. For the 3rd year in a row, customers gave JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat high marks in the Velociti Partners study. These sentiments are in line with the recent CIO Insight rankings which put Red Hat in the top position for reliability and value for the fifth time.

We are proud of our technical and support staff for an outstanding dedication to making our customers successful, and as we head into 2010 we look to continue this level of service for our customers.

Last week brought an early holiday present to many open source enthusiasts and technology consumers with the release of Fedora 12. Every six months the anticipation builds as I look forward to taking the latest version of Fedora for a test drive and trying out all of the new features and enhancements. After just a few days with Fedora 12 I’m already impressed with the feature set and polish in this release.

I’ve installed Fedora 12 on one of my laptops and also on a Dell mini netbook. First off, I really like the artwork in Fedora 12 and the new theme with the rays of light looks great. The Fedora Design Team continues to impress me with the new graphics and imagery they create for each release. Beyond that, everything just feels better and more comfortable, and the extra attention to detail all around the desktop really pays off.

I installed Fedora 12 from a USB key and the process was flawless and the fastest I’ve experienced yet with Fedora. The boot time was also very quick – even on my netbook. I’m excited to see Fedora’s support for the Moblin Core desktop environment in Fedora 12. This is my first experience with Moblin and I’m looking forward to putting in more time to test it out. Fedora continues to show the flexibility and functionality of free software and its impressive coverage of mini systems and netbooks with the inclusion of Moblin in Fedora 12.

Another feature in Fedora 12 that I’m happy to see is the improved webcam support. My webcam just works with Fedora 12.

Fedora 12 also includes several new virtualization features such as libguestfs that I look forward to trying out.

Red Hat’s software development model relies on its active sponsorship of leading open source projects including Fedora. This model enables Red Hat to deliver superior technology, faster, and with resulting products that are better suited to customer requirements. I thank the Fedora community for its continued hard work and congratulate them on yet another solid release. I encourage everyone to download Fedora 12 today and take it for a spin: http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.

Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. It offers customers opportunities to gain enhanced performance, centralized control and higher scalability for their systems, while deployed on a management server located inside the customer’s datacenter and firewall.

In September 2009, Red Hat released RHN Satellite 5.3, the first fully open source version of the product. This latest version offers opportunities for increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for customers with the incorporation of open source Cobbler technology in its provisioning architecture. The 5.3 release is also designed to allow customers to better scale with server growth, offering the ability to manage large numbers of systems with comparable ease to managing one.

Recently, IDC also published a Red Hat-sponsored paper featuring the systems management benefits that customers have experienced with RHN Satellite. After interviewing 10 RHN Satellite customers in depth – crossing geographies and industry verticals — IDC reported significant return on investment (ROI) and productivity results for customers. Here are some of the highlights from the customer testimonials:

• Average of 338% ROI
• Average payback period of 4.8 months
• A doubled increase in the number of Linux servers managed per system administrator
• Average annual benefit of $82,521 per 100 Linux servers
• Average of $23,207 in annual user productivity increase

In their own words, customers quoted in the paper showed that RHN Satellite helped them achieve:

• Enhanced productivity
  “If RHN Satellite Server didn’t exist, I would need another person or more.”
• Scalability
  “…with Satellite Server, once things are set up and it is in place, managing 200 servers is as easy as managing one.”
• Reduced costs
  “For an OS install, we used to hire someone outside to do the work. We would buy the hardware, then we pay them to come on site, answer questions. So now, we are completely avoiding that cost.”
• Faster server setup and management
  “As far as time saving goes, I would say we are easily saving 20 hours per month because we aren’t doing things manually.”
• Business growth
  “In terms of the impact, I always count what we can sell in an hour. If the system is down, we can’t sell and that’s a revenue impact. In just one hour, we might lose millions of euros, so the impact is huge.”

To read the full IDC paper on RHN Satellite, visit here.

To learn more about RHN Satellite, visit here.

Or, to read more about what customers have to say about RHN Satellite, visit here.

In previous Fedora 12 spotlight blogs we’ve highlighted SystemTap and desktop enhancements. Fedora 12 also includes a number of virtualization improvements, from better virtual disk performance and storage discovery to hot changes for virtual network interfaces, reduced memory consumption and a modern network booting infrastructure. For a more in-depth look, read the collection of interviews here with members of the Fedora community who have worked directly on the many virtualization improvements in Fedora 12.

Libguestfs and guestfish make their debut in Fedora 12 and continue Fedora’s long-standing leadership in making it easier for system administrators to manage virtual machines. Libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying the disk images of virtual machines. In combination with guestfish, the libguestfs interactive shell replaces the old and cumbersome methods of accessing guest disk images — creating loopback mounts as root, using kpartx, and reconfiguring LVM. The libguestfs feature lets administrators work directly with virtual guest machine disk images without any of these steps, and without booting those guests.

New higher-performance virtualization capabilities help administrators build more secure, powerful, scalable and easy to manage solutions. In Fedora 12, administrators can now choose to use huge page backed memory to reduce memory consumption and improve performance by reducing CPU cache pressure, retain VM hardware profiles across qemu upgrades, add network interfaces to a KVM guest without restarting, and enable VM hosts to discover new SAN storage and issue NPIV operations.

Several changes have been introduced to QEMU/KVM virtual machines in an effort to improve host security in the event of a flaw in the QEMU binary, and the deprecated etherboot PXE booting infrastructure has been replaced by gPXE. Fedora 12 also features improvements in the I/O performance of virtual machines using the qcow2 disk format, as well as improved tools for interface configuration.

Check out the video below, where Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields talks about a few of the Fedora 12 virtualization features with Red Hat’s Chris Wright, principal software engineer, and Hugh Brock, manager, Software Engineering.

Download this video:[Ogg Theora]

On November 3, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, a product set including the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers. Providing the opportunity for enterprises to overcome their previous barriers to virtualization adoption – like performance, scalability, cost and security – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers offers a new alternative for enterprises looking to invest in virtualization.

In line with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, we also launched three new Red Hat Services offerings — including training, certification and consulting — that are designed to equip customers with the knowledge, professional support and hands-on skills to help them better plan, adopt and optimize their use of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Developed in tandem with the product, the following services were created and will be delivered by instructors and consultants who are trained virtualization product experts.

Training and Certification

We’ve introduced a new Red Hat Training offering, RH318 Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, to help customers develop the skills they need to deploy and manage virtual environments. The four-day course, designed for experienced Linux system administrators, will help customers to:

• Gain the knowledge and proven hands-on skills to effectively deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies.
• Acquire hands-on experience with the technology through applied lab exercises.

Along with the course, we’ve also introduced a new Red Hat Training certification, the Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (RHCVA). Professionals who earn this certification have demonstrated the skills and knowledge needed to deploy and manage virtual hosts in production environments using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Like our other acclaimed certifications, the RHCVA requires candidates to pass a performance-based exam. Already, five of our channel partners have achieved the RHCVA as part of our program to create Red Hat virtualization specialists within our partner community.

Consulting

To offer customers an introduction to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies, we also now offer the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Quickstart consulting engagement. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Quickstart offers:

• One of the fastest ways to get up and running with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, aided and optimized by a Red Hat expert consultant, with confidence that the configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is done quickly and appropriately, and that functionality is fully demonstrated.
• An opportunity for organizations to gain the configuration expertise and operational knowledge to manage virtualization technologies with confidence.

To learn more about our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization training, certification and consulting opportunities, visit here.

With just a few days until the anticipated release of Fedora 12 we’re continuing our blog series on new features with a spotlight on desktop enhancements. We’ll just hit a few highlights on Fedora 12 desktop features in this blog, so if you’d like more in-depth information, be sure to check out this interview with Matthias Clasen. Matthias is a principal software engineer at Red Hat who works on the Desktop team and is also the upstream maintainer of GLib and GTK+.

NetworkManager was introduced in Fedora 7, and it has been polished release after release to provide greater usability, and is now designed to take advantage of other desktop improvements as well. In Fedora 12, NetworkManager provides comprehensive support for mobile broadband, and enhancements in the way Bluetooth and NetworkManager work together also deliver an improved experience for tethering to a supported Bluetooth-capable phone. If you’re always on the go, we believe that Fedora 12 will make it easier to be online using mobile broadband.

For users who want enhanced social experiences, Fedora 12 offers improved webcam support. Empathy, an instant messaging application that is part of the GNOME desktop, is also available in Fedora 12. It supports multiple IM protocols along with IRC, SIP (voice-over-IP) calling, and video chat. Empathy is built on top of a flexible communication framework called Telepathy, which makes it easier to integrate collaboration and communication features with the rest of the desktop. As Matthias explains, “One small glimpse of this is already visible with the ability to share your desktop with your chat contacts. We also hope to see rich integration with GNOME Shell in the future.”

In addition to individual features, Fedora 12 includes many small improvements that when combined, deliver a more enjoyable and friendly desktop experience. Here are just a few of those finishing touches that Matthias pointed out:

• Reduced visual noise by eliminated icons in menus and buttons
• Updated look and positioning of tooltips
• Improved font rendering and hinting
• Reduced frequency and updated visual appearance of notification bubbles
• Improved personalization of backgrounds by adding an easy way to get more backgrounds online

Can’t wait until the final release of Fedora 12? Download the Fedora 12 Beta here to try out the new desktop features today – and remember to update your system to the latest software and then reboot for best results. Interested in the entire list of improvements and innovations in Fedora 12? You’ll find the full feature list and details on the Fedora wiki.

Check out what the Fedora community is saying as the countdown to Fedora 12 continues. Follow Planet Fedora on twitter here: http://twitter.com/planetfedora.

While software spending in the mid-market is poised to return to positive growth , this sector of the market is generally cost conscious and is likely to expect increased ROI and high value for each dollar spent on technology. This is where we believe that server virtualization is particularly positioned to deliver, not only value, but overall savings as well.

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. We expect this announcement to help our partners by driving additional value to end customers.

As The VAR Guy pointed out earlier this fall, virtualized environments can yield up to a “60% return on investment over a four year time period,” which we feel is an opportunity that our partners and their customers can’t afford to pass up.

Server virtualization is expected to help customers reduce server “sprawl,” reduce maintenance and energy costs and increase performance capabilities. Additionally, Red Hat channel partners can assist their end customers with deployment, configuration, and consultation around virtualized servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an end-to-end virtualization solution designed to enable pervasive datacenter virtualization and significantly enhance capital and operational efficiency. It consists of the following components:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers: A feature-rich server virtualization management system that provides advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more.

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor: A modern hypervisor based on Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology, which can be deployed either as the standalone bare metal hypervisor (included), or as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and later (purchased separately) installed as a hypervisor host and managed through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers.

With the announcement this summer of our enhanced North American Partner Program, partners in North America must be authorized to sell Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization products; which includes being a registered Red Hat partner with a Virtualization Specialization. The specialization is achieved when a partner employs at least one Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technical-certified associate and at least two Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization sales-certified associates. Partners can click here to register for both the sales and technical courses.

The introduction of general availability for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an exciting opportunity for our valued partners in North America to be on the leading edge of Red Hat’s deeper expansion into the virtualization market.