Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) announced that the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products has transitioned to Beta and is on track for final delivery later this year. These products are part of the company's outlined strategy to offer solutions that expand the scope and market reach of its virtualization and cloud technologies. By sharing Red Hat's broad hardware and ISV ecosystem, the products will offer customers flexibility, operational choice and efficiency, while expanding the market adoption of virtualization.

In February, Red Hat announced its 2009 virtualization strategy and roadmap, which included plans to deliver the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, featuring server, client and management products designed to enable ubiquitous adoption of virtualization across the enterprise. Red Hat has worked with customers and partners over the past months in an effort to build a set of solutions that meet their deployment models and technology needs.

“We are very pleased by the welcome we have received from enterprise companies all over the world who are looking to adopt virtualization pervasively and value the benefits of our open source solutions. Our Beta program is oversubscribed,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. “We are excited to be in a position to deliver a flexible, comprehensive and cost-effective virtualization portfolio in which products will share a consistent hardware and software certification portfolio. We are in a unique position to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, ranging from a standalone hypervisor to a virtualized operating system to a comprehensive virtualization management product suite.”

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio builds upon the success of the integrated virtualization technology featured in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system since March 2007.

“Red Hat's virtualization strategy, announced last February, outlined a new standalone hypervisor coupled with server and desktop virtualization management products,” said Gary Chen, research manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software at IDC. “It is encouraging to see Red Hat advancing its virtualization technology with this beta announcement. After a seeing an early demo of the management platform it is clear that Red Hat is focused on offering customers more virtualization capabilities, so I look forward to seeing the final products later this year.”

For more information on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, please visit www.redhat.com/virtualization-strategy.

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