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Red Hat Listed Among 50 Top Tech Companies
Kelvin Ekston writes " Red Hat is listed among ZDNet Asia's 50 Top Tech companies 2006. It is also one of the fastest growing companies with 210.4% year on year income growth over 4 years.
While almost all Linux companies grapple with the perennial question of how they can make money through software subscriptions and services rather than selling packaged boxes, Red Hat finally managed to improve credibly and match the hype with substance and show the way to do business with Linux. That's the way to go!"
Redhat, everyone should agree, is one of the biggest players in a space we all know is growing nicely, and already has a pretty solid presence in the business space.
Cracking the top 50 isn't surprising, or terribly newsworthy.
That said, it's more proof that Linux® is on the radar screen, which is nice.
-- Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
Lots of companies never make a profit. Do you know what it takes to run a company? I'm going to guess not by that ignorant statment.
Some days it seems like some folks put them just a step above Microsoft.
I talk about stuff.
I for one am going to work for Tata Consultancy Services. You cannot go wrong when your services are consulted by Tata's. When you go through one of their consultations, you too will like their services. Maybe one of their services is to help the porn industry decide whether to use HD-DVD or Blu-Ray!
Good on Red Hat. How many times has this "business model" failed, continues to fail, or barely makes it? This way of doing business really relies on the scruples of the company. Financially, it isn't in their best interest to keep packages up to date. The longer they drag their feet, the more money they keep making in their subscriptions. It's like Code Sourcery. They port the GNU tool-chain for use on embedded platforms like ARM. They also give out their changes and such like they have to. What's to say what they give out doesn't have a few bugs that were fixed a long time ago but haven't quite made it to the free public version. If you pay them for support maybe you get a less buggy version.
I'm not skeptical of when a person does this for free and just relases the source. That's cool. When a company has to generate money by basically, fixing bugs and/or some customization, I think you need to be skeptical.
Just my paranoid thoughts on it I guess.
This is very possible - just spend some time at a financial site. Growth does not always refer to revenue. For example, revenue and profit are completely different numbers.
Just out of curiousity, why does anyone care about Red Hat? Their product isn't free. You can't go out and download a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
I'm going to get modded flamebait, but their business model is identical to Microsoft's. The only way to get Red Hat Linux is to buy it from them. If you aren't a paying customer, you mean zero to them.
Sure it's possible to build a system that is mostly the same at no cost, but you aren't running Red Hat and they won't give you any support if you run into problems.
You have a lot more faith in Apple's business ability than I do. Apple has always managed to survive but has seemed to be the future of the OS for the last twenty years. Apple has never been willing to allow their vertical integration to be broken (even with the move to Intel chips), and thus is always a niche market. For better or worse I don't see this changing.
Now, I have used Linux as my primary desktop at home for six years. In that time, it has improved more than any other desktop solution in terms of look and feel, but it was adequate from a productivity perspective even in 1999. Both Gnome and KDE have similarly improved.
What holds back Linux on the desktop is simply fear of change and fear of a lack of interoperability with MS products. These issues are being delt with quickly and I expect that within a short time both issues will be mitigated sufficiently to allow larger corporations to move quickly to Linux with only a bit more effort than upgrading Windows. With any luck we will be close to that before Vista really starts to become commonplace.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Let's face it, Red Hat's amaturish "desktop" offerings and lame marketing can't and won't overthrow Micrsoft.
Troll.
Red hat do not compete in the desktop space. Nice try.
As the future of Unix, Apple is also making strong claims on the server and super computer markets. Apples success with the Virginia Tech supercomputer is proof that Apple is opening up a lead in the top-end of the market.
Troll
You mean the way Linux "rules" Supercomputers with an estimated 60% of the top 500?
There seems to be an emerging consensus in Slashdot land that Apple and OS X is the future of Unix and the sole legitmate claimaint to the king of the desktop.
*sighs* Troll... modded up to +3 by apple fanboys - how predictable.
My pics.
If you still listen to analysts after the very public events of the last 5 years, you deserve what's coming to you.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Every tech I've ever met that has moved to Vancouver from Ottawa has talked about how far behind in technology the average infrastructure in Ottawa is. They blame it on the fact that Ottawa has a lot of goverment jobs. Based on that (and only that, I've never worked or been to Ottawa) I'd guess that an RHCE wouldn't be as valuable as an MCSE, as the Canadian Gov't hasn't embraced linux yet.
LMFAO Of course RHEL 2.1 AS has no LVM support, it was created four friggin years ago! And lets face it LVM on Linux back then was not what you would call, um, stable or reliable. But lets also look at what Red Hat has done with RHEL 2.1 AS. They've published updated and bug fixes over the last four years, and another 3 years into the future. It's still a reliable platform, even if it is no longer a modern one. And seriously, holding Red Hat accountable for what Oracle or some SAN provider is doing is ludacris. Like they have any control over the Oracle sourcecode or QA at another corporation, or licensing agreements offered by other companies on unrelated add-on products. There's a reason Oracle installs itself in /opt. I mean, That's like saying that Fedora sucks because your Nvidia graphics card doesn't work right, *mutters* with the binary drivers I downloaded from Nvidia and have nothing to do with Red Hat nor included in any part with the Red Hat distribution...
You want to talk about hinky agreements, how about the fact that SUN sales reps got kickbacks from Oracle based on the number of per CPU Oracle licenses they sold! Like that didn't encourage the sales people to tell the customer they need an extra 2 CPUs to really do the Oracle operations they wanted. I'm sure Red Hat has problems, like every other company, but dinging them because of crap that other companies do is silly.
-Runz