Submitted by An article at The Motley Fool lays out good financial news from Red Hat: “In its first quarter of fiscal 2009, Red Hat produced $0.08 of GAAP earnings per share on revenue of $156.6 million. That’s a 32% sales increase over last year, while profits held steady. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story here.
The open-source software veteran released major updates to four of its key products and re-signed every expired contract with its 25 largest subscribers — for 50% more than the worth of the old deals. It’s always cool to see the big boys upgrading their pacts, don’t you think? Red Hat continues to invest in its global sales and support infrastructure, funding the growth from organic cash flows.
Really good to see Red Hat doing so well!
Indeed, I can only say that it is well deserved. Red Hat has proven that it is a true open source company, and has invested a lot in nearly every facet of GNU/Linux. Recently, they have done a terrific job with IcedTea, virtual machine support, and infrastructure for rapid deployment and management.
Of course, Red Hat is making contracts! It has the best model, the best support and the best product. Why would any business switch from Red Hat? To what? If anything, they would switch what is not Read Hat to Red Hat. This is just plain logic.
I expect there would be more than a few people inside Oracle who would disagree with you and be a little annoyed that RH had renewed their contracts with all their largest customers. I would guess that many of these are also running Oracle on the RHEL servers thus being a prime target for their Linux Distro.
We’re both an Oracle (DB) and RedHat (OS) client and there’s no comparison.
Yes, Oracle has improved and Unbreakable Linux is improving – but nothing beats reporting a bug on Sunday and getting it fixed on Monday…
Beyond having (IMHO) a bullet proof OS (Kudos to CentOS as well), RedHat has a very solid support model that simply works ™.
– Gilboa
Wow, I always read about people complaining about red hat support. So it isn’t bad then?
Like everything else in life YMMV.
At least in my own experience, RedHat support is top notch.
– Gilboa
“In its first quarter of fiscal 2009”, I thought it was still 2008!
Fiscal year is a different measurement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_year