Red Hat: Open Source Software's Most Valuable Company Surpasses $1 Billion in Yearly Earnings

Red Hat (News - Alert), the world’s leading enterprise Linux company, has just reported a fiscal 2012 revenue of $1.13 billion – making it the most valuable open source company to date. Last year’s fourth quarter (4Q11) produced nearly $300 million in earnings, though it’s net income of $36 million was a little less than the $38.2 million earned in 3Q11.

Chief executive at Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst (News - Alert) announced, “Red Hat has become the first pure-play open source company and one of a few select software companies to have ever achieved this milestone.” He went on to explain the company’s new roots in previously unexplored territories for Linux enterprise systems, stating, “We have credibility with telcos and financial services and government – now expanding out to a whole different set of workloads and use cases through those enterprises.” 

The days when Linux was just a hobby for its father, Linus Torvalds, are long in the past – many flavors of the operating system are used across the world for networking, powering servers, providing a secure solution for database storage and even home computing. Red Hat just happens to be the distribution of choice for the majority of large corporations and organizations, which is what has lead to its wide spread success.

The reason Red Hat is the standard for enterprise Linux solutions is primarily due to its unrivaled team of professionals and extensive support. Floyd Strimling of Zenoss expands on that a little bit, stating, “With all due respect to other Linux distributions such as [Ubuntu (News - Alert)] and SUSE, Red Hat is the de facto standard for enterprise Linux.” Being one of the first commercial distributions on the market, it has made quite a name for itself.

Linux in general has become increasingly popular in recent times, with Canonical’s Ubuntu being the third most popular operating system – right under Windows and Mac OS, Google (News - Alert) using the kernel to drive Android, and now this. While Red Hat doesn’t have much of a place in the everyday lives of the complete end-user, it is unquestionably a leading platform in the database and networking field.