Red Hat, Inc. announced the introduction of its enterprise customer advocacy program, Red Hat Accelerators. Drawing on its extensive community-building history, the customer-facing program serves as a natural extension of its customer-focused approach to both its open source and enterprise product portfolio, enacted to form deeper and more engaging relationships with its customers. Red Hat Accelerators offers peer-to-peer networking with like-minded Red Hat practitioners to foster deeper learning and broaden exposure to various products, technologies, use cases and issues along with group discussions on features and functions. Along with access to Red Hat experts and business leaders, participants receive exclusive, early access to products, which helps develop their domain expertise and build credibility. The program also contributes to individual’s personal and professional development, expanding their knowledge and skills to stay relevant and up to date in the industry, amongst peers and with the market. Red Hat Accelerators launched as an established way to serve passionate enterprise customers who wanted to share and engage with each other around relevant IT issues, remedies and solutions. Additionally, Red Hat experts, product teams and even business leadership were included as a way for customers to voice their critical product and solution feedback, provide the business and product teams valuable insights, and help influence and improve development. The program also integrates a continued focus on customer advocacy and maintaining an environment that encourages public advocacy through blogging, social media, speaking engagements and more.