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Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish
ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"
You haven't seen a lot of big production environments then. They're more than common in larger buisnesses.
That's a pittance in corporate america.
Remember Bob Young's famous quote that his goal for RedHat was not to grow to the size of Microsoft, rather for Microsoft to shrink to the size of RedHat.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
At $609million in a year with MS at 10.9 Billion they are producing 1/20th the revenue of MS without selling a single product (where MS has hundreds) while Redhat is less than 10 years old and MS is close to 40 years old.
I'd say what RedHat is doing is pretty darn impressive. 1/20 the revenue of the largest software company in the world in 1/4 the time while only selling support and their product is available for free. Impressive doesn't even begin to describe how successful they are at this point.