Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of a new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop. In addition, the Company showcased several examples of its strategy of building forward-looking solutions that change the traditional notion of desktop computing for specific audiences and creating experiences that are more useful, more powerful and more accessible.

"Users, requirements and technologies have changed so dramatically over the past few years that the traditional one-size-fits-all desktop paradigm is simply exhausted. Commercial customers are still begging for desktop security and manageability for their knowledge workers; consumers are rapidly adopting new online services and applications; and developing nations are looking for affordable information technologies that bypass traditional desktops entirely," said Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat. "Our strategy is to deliver technologies that are specifically appropriate to these varied constituents, all based on open standards."

Desktop for Emerging Markets

Today Red Hat is announcing the upcoming availability of Red Hat Global Desktop. Global Desktop breaks through the price and performance barriers that have prevented many people from realizing the full benefits of state-of-the-art information technology. Red Hat and community members around the world recognized the need for a better solution to serve their local government and small business customers. This required removing the limitations that traditional desktop solutions imposed. In response, Red Hat developed the Global Desktop, which delivers a modern-user experience with an enterprise-class suite of productivity applications. Red Hat collaborated closely with Intel to enable the design, support and distribution of Global Desktop to be as close as possible to the customer.

In addition, Red Hat and Intel are taking advantage of Global Desktop's high performance and minimal hardware requirements to support a wide range of Intel's current and future desktop platforms, including the Classmate, Affordable, Community and Low-Cost PC lines.

"To address the demand for Linux on desktop systems by our customers in emerging markets, Intel and Red Hat worked together to deliver a pre-certified, cost-effective solution for Intel's reseller channel to extend their business value," said Steve Dallman, General Manager, Intel Worldwide Reseller Channel Organization. "Running Red Hat Global Desktop on Intel processor-powered PCs provides full access to applications and rich experiences to users across local markets, education, small businesses and government agencies."

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