Red Hat Crowns Itself First Ever $2bn Open Source Company

Red Hat is claiming to be the first open source company to reach revenues of $2 billion (£1.4bn), as the firm reports a 56th consecutive quarter of revenue growth.

Quarterly revenue for stood at $544 million (£384m), a 17 percent year-over-year increase. Subscription revenue hit $480 million (£338m), up 18 percent year-over-year, accounting for around 88 percent of Red Hat’s total revenue.

Cloud

Red Hat’s earnings were helped along by its cloud offerings as businesses switch spend more on cloud deployments, particularly as Red Hat Enterprise Linux  can work with Amazon, Microsoft Azure, and Google cloud platforms.

“Enterprises increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies drove our strong results,” said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst

“The fourth quarter marked our 56^th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, contributing to Red Hat’s first fiscal year crossing $2 billion in total revenue.”

Fourth quarter Application Development-related and other emerging technologies subscription revenue reached $89 million (£63m), up 38 percent year-over-year, or 43 percent in constant currency. Full fiscal year Application Development-related and other emerging technologies subscription revenue hit  $323 million (£227m), up 37 percent year-over-year or 46 percent in constant currency

“Our emerging cloud technologies are also gaining traction in our top deals, including a multi-million dollar win for OpenStack that we expect will be one of the largest installs of Openstack once it’s fully implemented,” said Whitehurt on the earnings call yesterday.

“The top vertical for the quarter was telecommunications, where we closed a number of deals with several global telecommunications providers.”

Whitehurst also noted financial services as being Red Hat’s next highest vertical.

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