Red Hat has announced it has signed a marketing agreement with Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) to deliver Red Hat solutions to defense-related, federal government, and commercial markets. The agreement highlights Red Hat's open source solutions and SAIC's depth and breadth in providing design and implementation services across leading companies and governments worldwide, the firms said.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two organizations will use their respective expertise to collaborate in the development and delivery of reliable open source solutions to customers. This collaboration is expected to provide powerful, proven solutions for federal agencies looking to improve operational effectiveness and productivity.

Red Hat is the recognized leader in enterprise solutions that take full advantage of the quality and performance provided by the open source model. With Red Hat, enterprise hardware and software vendors have a standard platform on which to certify their technology, assuring the necessary scalability and security of open source software and enabling mission-critical Linux deployments.

Red Hat's open source solutions are designed to satisfy the government's demand for scalable, reliable, high-performance and secure commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, the company says. By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the government will receive cost-effective products and solutions that can integrate with or replace existing systems with increased effectiveness, the company says.

During the signing ceremony at SAIC's McLean, Va., facility, Steven D. Rizzi, SAIC vice president of operations for Advanced Information Technology, said, "This agreement will benefit not only Red Hat and SAIC, but also our customers. By pairing SAIC's expertise in systems integration, software development, database architecture and management of large, complex projects with Red Hat's global open source enterprise leadership, our customers can benefit from the move to flexible, cost-effective, robust and open IT infrastructures."

"The product capabilities of Red Hat combined with the demonstrated success of SAIC in the federal IT marketplace can enable federal agencies to rapidly move toward an open systems model, incorporating open source solutions to meet the complex system requirements of the U.S. military, intelligence community, homeland security and other federal agencies," said Paul Smith, Red Hat's vice president for government sales operations. "This new collaboration offers Red Hat's functionality, scalability, security and performance combined with SAIC's federal government expertise to meet many of the U.S. government's most pressing challenges."

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