Bangalore: Red Hat, an open source solution provider has announced the winners of its Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) 2009. Among the five winners worldwide, the winner for the India region is Balaji Sirsani from Hyderabad. He is a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at Computer Associates and manages a lab with more than 150 machines. The winners will be honored at a special RHCE and Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) reception at the 2009 Red Hat Summit in Chicago, September 1-4, 2009. Launched in 1999, the RHCE certification is a performance-based Linux certification program. There are more than 40,000 RHCEs worldwide and India has approximately 15,000 RHCEs - more than any other country. Professionals holding RHCE certification have continually helped their companies with successful deployments and migrations. "I have been passionate about Linux since my school days, which motivated me to take this certification," said Sirsani. "My RHCE skills have increased my visibility in the work place and enabled me to more efficiently manage a lab of more than 150 machines." He has utilized his RHCE skills to easily set up kickstart with Red Hat Network, reducing the time and effort it previously took to manually install machines. Shankar Iyer, Director, Services for Red Hat India said, "It is our pleasure to announce the winners of the 2009 RHCE of the Year program. In association with more than 150 partners across India, we have been able to train and certify lakhs of students and professionals on Linux. The RHCE certification continues to help stimulate the careers of IT professionals." Increased adoption of open source by governments and enterprises is opening a wide array of career avenues in open source software development.