Dallas Area ISP Receives 39 Red Hat Certifications

The Planet(SM) today announced that 39 employees, representing a majority of departments across the company, have received Red Hat certifications. Of the 39 employees achieving RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) status, 33 received the prestigious RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) certification. Company wide, The Planet now has 47 RHCTs, of which 40 are RHCEs.

"With 60 percent of The Planet's customers using the Red Hat platform, this level of certification further demonstrates our commitment to support our customers' technology," said Pamela Houston, course and training coordinator at The Planet. "We have had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Red Hat and look forward to continuing and expanding that relationship."

One unique factor in the Red Hat certifications is that the recently certified employees do not all come from our technical support team. Staff members within departments such as abuse, customer care, product development, information systems, provisioning, sales, professional services, Internet data center, security and support all participated in classes and achieved certification.

"Rarely do companies have so many certifications across such varied departments and levels. In fact, this recent achievement puts The Planet in the top five hosting companies in terms of number of Red Hat certifications," said Michael Sutphen, hosting provider account executive for Red Hat. "The Planet should be very proud of its employees and their accomplishments."

"With this milestone, The Planet has made RHCE a key part of their strategy for support of Linux-based managed services," said Peter Childers, vice president of Global Learning Services at Red Hat. "RHCEs can play a key role in demanding client services contexts, assuring excellent 24x7 technical services and support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for The Planet's customers."

The Planet conducted the classes with in-house technical trainers including Greg Bock, Michael Montgomery, Anthony Yarbrough and Tim Schuh. Pamela Houston coordinated the effort with Red Hat.

Employees began internal training classes in August to prepare for the rigorous examination process that ended in early December.