Yeah, great, 2% of the X86 market, sure we'll port our software to OSX - Samo Korosec
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Red Hat posts bumper financial figures, touts Linux popularity
LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has unveiled bumper quarterly profits that put it on course to generate $1bn in revenue by the end of its financial year.
Red Hat announced first quarter 2012 financial year revenue of $265m, up 27 per cent from the same quarter last year. Net income during the quarter was $32.5m, up over 35 per cent from the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, leaving the firm in a bullish mood claiming that its revenue might rise to $1.09bn by the end of its financial year.
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat told Bloomberg that the firm expects its revenue to triple to $3bn within five years. "The market is coming to us because all the new development is happening on Linux or, more broadly, on an open-source platform. Clouds in general run on open source," said Whitehurst.
Whitehurst's comments about cloud deployments generally using open source have been echoed by Canonical, which claims that Ubuntu is the most popular operating system installed on Amazon's EC2 cloud service.
Red Hat also sees cloud deployment as a big revenue generator, saying that as firms use virtualisation and cloud computing to greater ability, Red Hat "is well positioned to capitalise". Red Hat's success is also Linux's success, as the company is seen as the barometer for enterprise deployment.
Many large companies deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux and rival Linux vendors such as Canonical and Suse are following Red Hat in securing new business, which all just goes to show that open source software is a sustainable and growing business model with healthy competition among vendors. µ
Tags: Software
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Just rubbish. Vastly more development is on .Net and Sharepoint - that's where it's happening at the moment.
Redhat's growth is at the expense of large UNIX systems. It is massively failing aganst Microsoft in the low and mid range space. They are just praying that cloud means something to them, but it's looking unlikely.
The vast majority of open source development in the cloud is ecommerce sites that would have used Linux anyway. Often they are too tight to pay for a supported OS and run free versions anyway, which doesnt help Redhat.
I think Whitehurst has previously said that for every $1 in revenue Red Hat get, they take $10 away from their competitors.
So Red Hat will likely never have the size or the advertising budget of their rivals. But you can see how disruptive they can be in the enterprise space, and how some even among potential customers might fight tooth and nail to avoid losing their cushy jobs.