Red Hat Becomes First $2 Billion Open-Source Company (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Red Hat just became the first open-source company to make a cool 2 billion bucks. Not bad considering Red Hat became the first billion dollar Linux company only four years ago. Red Hat did it the old-fashioned way: They earned the money instead of playing upon the gullibility of venture capitalists. Red Hat's total revenue for its fourth quarter was $544 million. That's up 17 percent in U.S. dollars year-over-year, or 21 percent measured constant currency. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $480 million, up 18 percent in U.S. dollars year-over-year, or 22 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue in the quarter was 88 percent of total revenue. Analysts estimated Red Hat would make $534 million. Looking ahead for its 2016 FY Red Hat expects to see between $2.380 billion to $2.420 billion. At this rate, Red Hat should easily become the first $3 billion open-source company.
While Red Hat's president and CEO Jim Whitehurst credits the "hybrid cloud infrastructures," Red Hat's subscription revenue can largely be ascribed to Red Hat's flagship product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Still, RHEL, which is now available on Microsoft Azure, is becoming a prominent cloud operating system.

Comments

RHT is a 13 billion dollar company...

[Junta]

Generally, when you say 'an X dollar company', people are referring to market cap, or the aggregate consensus value believed in by your investors.

Re:"Open Source"

[Archangel Michael]

Most Products and Services in the IT world are that way. Dell Computers are more expensive not because they are better, but rather because you get "Enterprise" support. Do not underestimate the power of "Enterprise Support" in the world of CIOs and Directors of IT. They have a distinct aversion to taking the blame for bad decisions, and that "Enterprise" label allows them to shift blame to the vendors.

When you build the solution yourself, and it doesn't work, you get the blame. When you have Dell or someone else "Enterprise" build it, and it doesn't work, you can blame the vendor. That difference is worth the price for the people that care.

Re:"Open Source"

[Archangel Michael]

We recently bought a set of servers from ___, Enterprise VMWare destined servers, and the SSDs? LiteOn. Which failed to deliver the performance needed for the job. Flat out didn't work. Granted, the company _____ replaced the drives, eventually, after we proved they were not capable. The problem I have, is I would NEVER have spec'ed LiteOn Drives for anything even close to "Enterprise".

And in the end, we wasted nearly 4 Man Months of time trying to fix the problem.

And my boss, buys Enterprise, even when I can PROVE that they are exactly the same, off the shelf consumer products, for twice the price. Me, I would buy two for the price of "Enterprise" and keep one on the shelf as a Spare. Knowing where you can get the perfomance you need, at a price that isn't "Enterprise" often allows you to stretch your IT budget AND provide the support your organization needs.

I'll pay for support, I'll even pay a lot for support. But I won't pay for "Enterprise" that is only "consumer" with a new label.

Here is BACKBLAZE's article on Drives t hat kind of supports my view ... https://www.backblaze.com/blog...