Mark Bohannon to Lead Red Hat Governmental Affairs and Public Policy

RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Mark Bohannon will join the company as Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Global Public Policy on Oct. 1, 2010. He will lead Red Hat's worldwide team representing the company's interests before policy makers in government, industry consortia, and other venues regarding issues such as technology and innovation policy, open source and standards adoption, intellectual property legislation, government technology initiatives, and tax regulation.

“Mark brings a wealth of experience in technology policy at the state, national and international government levels”

“Mark brings a wealth of experience in technology policy at the state, national and international government levels,” said Michael Cunningham, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Red Hat. “His expertise will be a valuable asset to Red Hat in working effectively with global policy makers on key issues affecting the company.”

Bohannon joins Red Hat from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal U.S. trade association for the software and digital content industry, where he was Senior Vice President, Public Policy. During his ten years at SIIA, Bohannon was responsible for the association's government relations agenda. He worked with leading software companies on strategic trends affecting company products and services. Among his leadership roles, Bohannon served as chairman of the Executive Committee of the United States Information Technology Office (USITO), the voice of the United States ICT industry to China in 2007-2008.

Earlier in his career, Bohannon was a senior official at the U.S. Department of Commerce where he served as Chief Counsel for Technology and Counsellor to the Under Secretary for Technology. He provided strategic advice on a broad array of technology, trade, intellectual property, computer security, encryption and competitive initiatives and facilitated public-private partnerships and technology joint ventures. Bohannon also served on numerous United States Government delegations to bilateral negotiations and multilateral bodies such as The Hague, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). He served as Vice Chair of the OECD’s Working Party on Information Security and Privacy.

Bohannon earned a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and holds a Juris Doctor from George Washington University. He has testified on numerous occasions before the U.S. Congress, European Commission and other government bodies.

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About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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