Red Hat announces India winners of RHCE

MUMBAI, INDIA: Red Hat, Inc., today announced the winners of its 2009 RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) of the Year award. Among the five winners worldwide, the winner for the India region is Balaji Sirsani from Hyderabad.

“I have been passionate about Linux since my school days, which motivated me to take this certification,” said Balaji Sirsani, a senior quality assurance engineer with Computer Associates.

“My RHCE skills have increased my visibility in the work place and enabled me to more efficiently manage a lab of more than 150 machines,” he added.

Launched in 1999, the RHCE certification is one of the largest performance-based Linux certification programs. Its success and longevity stem from a solid track record of benchmarking the skills of Linux professionals through a performance-based assessment of the competencies necessary to administer Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

There are more than 40,000 RHCEs worldwide and India has approximately 15,000 RHCEs, more than any other country. Professionals holding RHCE certification have continually helped their companies with successful deployments and migrations.

Shankar Iyer, director, Services for Red Hat India said, “It is our pleasure to announce the winners of the 2009 RHCE of the Year program. In association with more than 150 partners across India, we have been able to train and certify lakhs of students and professionals on Linux. The RHCE certification continues to help stimulate the careers of bright and talented IT professionals.”

Red Hat is strengthening the open source ecosystem in India by training and honing promising talent. India has been an active consumer of open source products and in contributing to open source projects worldwide. The Open Source Index, a study Red Hat published in conjunction with the Georgia Institute of Technology comparing and contrasting open source activity and environment, ranked India as eighth overall for community activity. In addition, India is a large contributor to the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration.

Increased adoption of open source by governments and enterprises is opening a wide array of career avenues in open source software development. A trained and certified technical workforce will be increasingly important as open source continues to grow across the globe, added the press release.