Red Hat reveals revenue rise

Open source evangelists Red Hat today announced financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year ending May 2011 showing a year-on-year revenue increase of 27 per cent to $264.7 million (165.5 million).

Subscription revenue alone for the quarter was $225.5 million - an increase of 26 per cent year-on-year. The company also reported a first quarter operating cash flow of $90 million - up by 49 per cent.

Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive (CEO) of Red Hat, said the results had exceeded company expectations.

"We believe there is a fundamental shift in IT spending, in which cloud computing and virtualisation have become key strategic priorities," he said.

"Red Hat is well positioned to capitalise on this growing demand as enterprise customers look to Red Hat when upgrading and modernising their IT infrastructure."

A rise of 28 per cent in operating income delivered results of $66.5 million for the first quarter, whilst net income for was $32.5 million compared to $24.1 million last year

Charlie Peters, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Red Hat, believed the company's innovation had been key to its success.

"We introduced innovative new cloud technologies such as OpenShift, our PaaS offering, and CloudForms, our IaaS offering," he said.

"In addition, we enhanced our core products, including the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and strengthened our partnerships with the launch of Open Virtualisation Alliance."