Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, says that nominations are open for the 2016 Red Hat Innovation Awards. 2016 will mark the 10th anniversary of the awards, which recognize the innovative ways that individuals, companies and partners worldwide are implementing Red Hat’s technologies.

Organizations from around the world use Red Hat technologies to build IT infrastructures that can drive business innovation. The 2016 Red Hat Innovation Awards will celebrate these efforts by recognizing outstanding work and next-generation business application deployments happening with open source solutions and, specifically, Red Hat technology.

Category winners will be selected based on the uniqueness, complexity, and magnitude of their Red Hat implementations. The categories include:

Infrastructure: Recognizing the notable flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness, performance, and security within an infrastructure.
Modernize: Recognizing an outstanding transition from aging infrastructure and restrictive vendors towards open source, standardized solutions.
Transform: Recognizing the best use of Red Hat solutions to transform an IT department from a call center to a business partner that can provide self-service and useful automation.

Panel evaluates

Cloud: Recognizing the most successfully illustrated cloud deployment using Red Hat’s cloud technology portfolio.
Application Development: Recognizing the most outstanding employment of agile methodologies and superior overall performance of creating, maintaining, and deploying successful business applications, whether they be traditional, mobile or cloud, using Red Hat solutions.
Accelerate, Integrate, Automate: Recognizing the best overall acceleration, integration, and automation of IT workloads using Red Hat products.

Each submission will be evaluated by a panel in the field of business and open source technology, including: Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat; Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat; Carla Arend, program director, European Software, IDC; Sean Michael Kerner, senior editor, eWEEK; and Henry Peyret, principal analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.

Submissions will be accepted through the Red Hat Innovation Awards website until Dec. 11, 2015. A winner will be recognized in each of the six categories. From these winners, the Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting. The 2016 Red Hat Innovation Award winners and the 2016 Red Hat Innovator of the Year award recipient will be recognized during Red Hat Summit 2016, June 28-July 1, 2016, in San Francisco.