Red Hat becomes first $2B open-source company

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

 

Just think: Some people still don't believe that you can make money from Linux and open-source software. Fools! Red Hat just became the first open-source company to make a cool 2 billion bucks.

 

Not bad considering Red Hat became the first billion dollar Linux company only four years ago. That may not be unicorn country, but unlike many billion dollar valuation companies, Red Hat did it the old-fashioned way: They earned the money instead of playing upon the gullibility of venture capitalists.

 

Red Hat's total revenue for its fourth quarter was $544 million. That's up 17 percent in US dollars year-over-year, or 21 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $480 million, up 18 percent in US dollars year-over-year, or 22 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue in the quarter was 88 percent of total revenue.

 

Analysts estimated Red Hat would make $534 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."

 

For the full 2016 fiscal year, Red Hat's total revenue was $2.05 billion, up 15 percent in US dollars year-over-year, or 21 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue for the full fiscal year was $1.8 billion, up 16 percent in US dollars year-over-year, or 22 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue in the full fiscal year was 88 percent of total revenue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read the rest: http://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-becomes-first-2b-open-source-company/

[Unobscured Vision]

Awesome! Really, I'm very pleased for them. They deserve all of the success they've achieved. The Enterprise Sector Linux scene is absolutely on fire right now (in a good way!), and it's largely due to Red Hat and .rpm-based Distributions being so rock-solid.

 

My "hat's" off to them (snicker)!