Red Hat Continues to Grow and Make Money

Red Hat's Fortunes Rising

The last three months have been good ones for Red Hat. The enterprise Linux vendor reported its first-quarter fiscal 2011 financial results this week, showing growth coming from all sides with Linux platform, JBoss middleware and professional services revenues up, and customers new and old expanding their spending with Red Hat.

Red Hat's earnings report comes as the company is gearing up for a major release of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform as well as new cloud and virtualization efforts.

For the quarter ending May 31, Red Hat reported revenue of $209.1 million, a 20 percent year-over-year increase from the same quarter a year earlier. Net income came in at $24.1 million, or $0.12 per share -- an increase over the $18.5 million reported last year at this time. Minus one-time charges, earnings totaled $0.18 per share -- up three cents from a year ago, and in line with Wall Street estimates, according to Thomson Reuters. Looking forward to the second quarter of fiscal 2011, Red Hat provided guidance of revenues estimated at between $210 million to $212 million.

"We experienced solid demand in all major geographies and across all our products suites," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said during the company's analyst call. "This demand was further highlighted by winning the largest deal in our history in the past quarter, an eight-figure deal with a mainstream customer, which was primarily middleware."

Whitehurst did not name the company that had signed the deal, though he noted that it was...

Read the rest of this Red Hat Linux story at Datamation.com