Red Hat Inc. has decided to keep its trademark fedora hanging in North Carolina, declining the overtures of other states Monday as it announced it will build its next corporate headquarters in the Raleigh area and create more than 500 new jobs over the next decade.
Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of the Raleigh-based Linux software developer, joined Gov. Beverly Perdue at a news conference announcing the company would remain in North Carolina’s Triangle region, where it has been since the 1990s.
The Perdue administration said Red Hat plans a $109 million investment in Wake County that will create 540 jobs above the nearly 700 it already has in North Carolina by 2020. The state is offering up to $18 million in incentives and benefits if Red Hat meets job and investment goals, Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco said.
The new jobs will have average salaries of more than $80,000, according to Crisco’s office.
“We call this our company,” Perdue said after donning a red fedora for the announcement. “It’s kind of like NASCAR. It was born here, it was bred here. We’re going to do whatever it’s legal to keep it here.”
Whitehurst said the publicly traded company had eyed offers to move to Massachusetts, Atlanta and Austin, Texas, but decided to stay put in North Carolina, saying it offered the best overall package.
“Without the incentives, we would not have been able to stay here,” Whitehurst said.
A state economic investment committee voted just before Monday’s announcement to offer more than $15 million of the incentives.
Red Hat, with more than 2,500 employees worldwide, sells software and other platforms to run on the Linux operating system. The company opened corporate headquarters in Durham in 1996 and moved to a campus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 2002.
The company generated net income of $26…