IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has been named Global Strategic Partner of the Year by Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions. This award was announced at Red Hat Summit, which took place last month in Boston.

Each year, Red Hat gives this honor to the partner that best: delivers visible and compelling business value to Red Hat; shows commitment to Red Hat and positive contributions to the open source community; facilitates and drives successful engagement with the Red Hat field; and strategically aligns their capabilities to Red Hat's emerging technologies.

The alliance between IBM and Red Hat is broad, covering IBM Systems, both Power Systems and z Systems, IBM Technology Support Services and IBM Cloud. In the past year, IBM announced that, through joint engineering and deeper product collaborations, it plans to deliver solutions built on key components of Red Hat's portfolio of open source solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability offerings on IBM Power Systems. In addition, IBM developed a managed service offering for the private cloud market, IBM Bluemix Private Cloud with Red Hat, which uses Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage. IBM Technology Support Services is a leading support provider of Red Hat Enterprise Linux software. This relationship allows customers running Red Hat Linux operating systems to engage IBM experts who have been providing Linux support for more than 16 years. IBM provides customers the confidence in having enterprise grade support for Linux environments across IBM Systems and x86 platforms through a single point of contact.

"IBM has a long-standing relationship with Red Hat and together we have helped lead the open source and open standards movement, providing open source solutions that enable our customers beyond the limits of proprietary technologies," said Dexter Henderson, vice president, Power Systems, IBM. "From enabling the entire IBM Systems product line for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to most recently becoming a Red Hat certified Cloud and Service Provider, our alliance with Red Hat has been a driving force for digital transformation."

"Our collaboration with IBM has expanded over the last 17+ years and we are thrilled to honor them as our Global Strategic Partner of the Year," said Scott Musson, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, Red Hat. "Together, we are working to deliver modern IT solutions that can help our joint customers around the world innovate faster with open source."

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