Red Hat Opens First New Zealand Office

Auckland, New Zealand – 6 April 2011 - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the opening of its first New Zealand office, to support its local business.

The new Auckland-based office will be geared toward further promoting the adoption and growth of Red Hat’s Linux, middleware and cloud computing offerings through its network of partners.

“Red Hat has been servicing New Zealand through the channel for some years and we expect our local business to grow in line with worldwide trends,” said Max McLaren, managing director for Red Hat Australia and New Zealand.

“Our investment in a formal New Zealand presence is a result of the growing interest and opportunity for our solutions in this competitive market, with more and more organisations across the country using open source as a way to ‘achieve more with less’.”

Red Hat has been offering open source solutions though its distributor, Ingram New Zealand; Advanced Business Partners Datacom, Geni, OSS and Solnet; and OEM Partners IBM, HP, Dell, and Cisco, in addition to its many Red Hat Ready partners. With its new presence, Red Hat will focus on working closely with these partners to help new and existing customers drive down IT costs while improving productivity

Red Hat currently has customers throughout New Zealand, representing a broad spectrum of industries and enterprise sizes. Customers including BNZ, the New Zealand Lotteries Commission and NZ Post are joined by other users from various sectors including IT and telecommunications, government, utilities, media, banking and finance, retail, services, education (primary through to tertiary) and primary industry.

Craig Nielsen, Red Hat’s new country manager for New Zealand, formerly Red Hat’s Director for OEM business in APAC, is enthusiastic about working with partners and customers to promote open source.

“With an established and committed partner ecosystem on the ground, our initial presence will be modest, but as our business develops we will be on the look out for avenues for expansion,” said Craig.

“In the meantime, we're excited about opportunities to continue working with the New Zealand open source community and government organisations to grow the use of open source. We will also aim for our investment to help foster the local creation and development of innovative new ideas and technologies that can be showcased to the rest of the world."

ENDS

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