23 March 2016, USA : Red Hat was the first billion dollar Linux company, now it’s the first $2 billion open-source company. Red Hat Inc. beat Wall Street expectations and edged over the $2 billion annual revenue threshold, reporting fourth-quarter revenues of $544 million, beating analyst estimates of $534 million. Revenues were up 17 percent year-over-year. Perhaps more importantly, subscription revenues were up 18 percent to $480 million.
Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s president and CEO credits “Enterprises increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies” for driving the company’s strong results. Whitehurst continued, “Customers are demanding technologies that modernize the development, deployment and life-cycle management of applications across hybrid cloud environments. Many are relying on Red Hat to provide both the infrastructure and the application development platforms to run their enterprise applications consistently and reliably across physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud environments.”
The company is also benefiting from Microsoft’s new embrace of open source technology. The two companies announced a broad partnership in November to promote their cloud offerings and to make Red Hat’s enterprise Linux distribution available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The partnership “gives Red Hat a strong partner with enterprise and web-scale presence to build a hybrid cloud foundation,” wrote Wikibon’s Brian Gracely. The company also did a deal with Rackspace Inc. last month to offer Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform on Rackspace’s private cloud.
