As part of the agreement, GlobeTOM, which is also an Oracle Certified Partner, will resell Red Hats portfolio of Open Source solutions to its customers throughout SA. In return, Red Hat will provide support both in pre-sales and in distribution, as well as exclusive access to product information, evaluation versions and other materials.

GlobeTOM develops and delivers software and services designed to address the requirements of service providers in the communications and utility services industries worldwide, in areas including billing, billing mediation, decision-support, usage mediation, network management and operation support readiness.

Since inception in 2002, GlobeTOM has worked extensively with Red Hat, and has already established a large Red Hat installed base that is fully supported by GlobeTOM. The installed base includes large, mission-critical computing grids in the telecommunications industry that meet and exceed all of the availability and performance requirements of GlobeTOM customers, the company says.

Our partnership with Red Hat is an important building block in establishing GlobeTOM as a player in the Linux market, says Bheki Nkomo, CEO of GlobeTOM. We believe, from our own experience, that Linux and specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux is ready for large-scale deployment in SA. Red Hat can bring huge cost savings to many customers as it can run on commodity hardware and offers very favourable subscription models to suit the need of the enterprise.

Francois Lucatelli, EMEA channel sales manager for Red Hat, comments: The appointment of GlobeTOM as the second local Red Hat Advanced Partner is another important step in showing Red Hats commitment to expand its regional presence and continue to establish a strong support base through partnership in the country.