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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!"
Beat me to the punch.
Its the same as when people complain that surveys done that show Windows is better than Linux is funded by Microsoft. This should be taken with a large grain (hell, a pinch) of salt.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
and already has a pretty solid presence in the business space.
Yeah. 2 years of profits. That's solid.
That might be considered "solid" in the Open Source industry, but as a business in general, they're still considered a relatively unproven start-up. I want to see at least a solid 5-10 years of profitability before I'd consider investing a dime, personally.
I don't respond to AC's.
Agreed. I find it amusing that I've found even things like working with apt easier on Fedora than I did on my Debian box (before I converted it over), given that I first learned apt through Debian like many here. Perhaps it's because there are so many well-maintained RPM repositories like Dag, Dries, et al out there.
My whole office at work uses RHEL - works well, although it doesn't have as wide of RPM support as Fedora, and software stays further behind.
Did you really name your son "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--"?
Sure they grow their income, but by that's flogging training, support and having an underpaid skeletal staff and not actually doing that much?
Ever *used* RH support in a corporate environment? If your query is beyond RTFM it's a constant battle to get anywhere. Plus their QA is terrible given they're competing on the corporate level - we've had hanging kernels (on pretty stock hardware) and endless dodgy packages we've had to replace.
There's this endless love in on messageboards because they're FOSS promoters and actually comply to the GPL, but when it comes to working with them if you're corporate and you don't have a sizeable contract with them (ie. govt or multinational) their product in terms of service is no where near close to what you'd expect from other vendors in the market.
It's interesting to see that they've managed this with less than 1000 employees. Only two others in the list are comparable in this respect. Plenty of other companies on the list have thousands or tens or thousands of employees.
Red Hat's stock is on an astronomical PE ratio, higher even than Google's. It's pretty instructive comparing the PE ratio to, say, Novell's which is about a tenth as high.
So, I guess it's clear the financial market is very much buying the line that "Red Hat is Linux", perhaps much more than was the case a year or two ago. Nice news if you're Red Hat. Not so nice for anyone else.
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If that's the case, then why is RedHat dipping following analyst downgrades?
Oh, I have nearly 15 years of proven skill. I think what I'm getting at here is, there is a sizeable amount of demand for RH services and/or support -- yet people who are certified with their products seem to find less demand than, say, MCSE.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Besides, RedHat's 36% annual revenue growth for 4 years is impressive. Sure it's easier for smaller company to score big growth numbers, but $200M in revenue and 36% annual growth seems like a pretty nice place to be.
The nice thing is RedHat's success actually means something to Linux users, even if they're not RedHat customers, because RedHat is quite active in developing OSS.
I personally put some money into RedHat last summer. Not enough to bankrupt me or to get rich, you understand, but I'm currently sitting on about 41% equity growth.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
At which point you'll be investing in a mature, proven company...with a lot less growth potential, and hence much lower stock appreciation prospects.
The way to make big money in the stock market is to find small, great companies and ride their coattails to wealth. More risk, but far greater rewards.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I thought it odd that F5 Networks was there, but Google wasn't...
I DID like that RH made the list with 800 employees...compared to 11,000 for Apple, or 56,000 for M$.
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Look at something like AMD (the automounter, not the chip) and NFS. Wanna lock up your Mac OS X box? Merely access the automount point (/net for us). The finder and AMD don't mix. WTF? It's been this way from 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and now 10.4. Yes, 10.4 is better. Waaaaay better than just a couple of revs ago. Mature it is not. In 10 years it might have a chance, though remote, of being as stable as Linux and Solaris are today.
In general, when I have some opensource package I need to compile and install on all the UNIX boxes here, what system will make me spend 90% of the time on it? That's right, Mac OS X. Yes, 10.4 is better, but I could waste whole days trying to get crap to compile on 10.3 and before.
I'm hoping someone'll put together a "best of" compilation, using what's stable (and what can be made stable) from the RPM repositories - including Fedora - but optimized much more aggressively. I would, but I don't have the bandwidth or the disk space to carry a distro. If someone was interested in hosting, that would be another matter. I'd certainly be willing to compile the code and upload it to a host site.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Mod me down if you want, but a few years ago, pets.com could have been listed there too.
This may be an indication of great things to come, or it could be the start of the much speculated upon Linux bubble.
Don't jump to conclusions.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Critizing is one thing, but have you read some of the brain dead comments comming out? What exactly is the point of your post?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How is RPM fundamentally more flawed than deb, pkg, or other common package formats? Please keep it technical, thank you.
XML causes global warming.