Red Hat Sales Surge

head_dunce writes "Red Hat has reported earnings from its third quarter, and it did quite a bit better than expected. Even with the movement within the business by Oracle and SuSE/Microsoft, Red Hat came out quite a bit ahead. TheStreet.com reports on the company's $29.6 Million dollars windfall, and some of the tough times the company has had in the past year. From the article: 'CFO Charlie Peters said on a conference call with analysts that the company is "cautiously optimistic that competitive efforts by some of the largest technology companies in the world are actually expanding our opportunity."'"

Comments

Re:Make up your mind

[Kelson]

Yes, they still offer workstations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS

Ideal for power users and a wide range of high-performance technical client applications such as visualization, software development, and engineering design. Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS supports large-memory client systems with up to two CPUs.

Red Hat Desktop

Designed for general users who need a variety of software from email to web applications. Red Hat Desktop is designed for volume deployments that require a secure and centralized management infrastructure for client systems.

Re:numbers.

[Silver Sloth]

Is it just me, or did they spend almost twice as much on marketing as they did in the same quarter, previous year? Yes, that's what the figures say, and maybe an increase in marketing is the driver for the increase in turnover. However I'm more impressed by the line below

Sales and marketing 37,575 20,505 105,883 61,296
Research and development 19,200 9,644 51,084 29,846
General and administrative 18,024 12,357 49,579 34,067

which shows a greater, in %age terms, increase in R&D, and the next line which shows an much smaller increase in 'General and adminstrative'

It seems to me that a company concetrating on R&D and marketing is one which is healthy. The (dis)organisation I work for seem to have got that one arse about face!

Re:This might have something to do with

[morcego]

RedHat has a release plan, and they won't deviate from it. In any case, RHEL 5 is already in advanced beta stage.

I really don't know what you mean about 2.6.9-EL getting in the way. True, it does use mostly 2.6.9 API/ABI, but not strictly (as anyone how tried to compile some external kernel modules, like ieee80211 and ipw2200 have found out), and also contain lots of updates. The only external driver I use is ipw2200, and that only because I wanted monitor mode. And, since I was already recompiling it, I went the upgrade path as well.

Many people see 2.6.9 and think: "OLD!". That is really not the case. Using the latests version on any production server is very dangerous. In any case, "STABLE" beats "NEW" every time in my book.

Lastly, please remember it is 2.6.9-EL, and not 2.6.9. They are very different beasts.
Please read "speaks backport".