Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
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 $200M in revenue and 36% annual growth seems like a pretty nice place to be.
The nice thing is RedHat's success actually means something to Linux users, even if they're not RedHat customers, because RedHat is quite active in developing OSS.
I personally put some money into RedHat last summer. Not enough to bankrupt me or to get rich, you understand, but I'm currently sitting on about 41% equity growth.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
At which point you'll be investing in a mature, proven company...with a lot less growth potential, and hence much lower stock appreciation prospects.
The way to make big money in the stock market is to find small, great companies and ride their coattails to wealth. More risk, but far greater rewards.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I thought it odd that F5 Networks was there, but Google wasn't...
I DID like that RH made the list with 800 employees...compared to 11,000 for Apple, or 56,000 for M$.
My
How is RPM fundamentally more flawed than deb, pkg, or other common package formats? Please keep it technical, thank you.
XML causes global warming.