Red Hat’s growth has proven largely immune to the economic slowdown that stymied much of the rest of the enterprise IT sector. Can the Linux vendor do it again? Ahead of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings, LinuxPlanet takes a look at Red Hat’s prospects, and in particular, its strength in virtualization and cloud computing initiatives — both of which are seen as key to its future growth.
Of course, Wall Street will also be watching to see if there’s any impact from other trends, like embattled rival Novell’s own growing Linux business, and the implications of Sun’s Solaris — another competitor — having become the property of Oracle.
For many in the IT world, the last twelve months are likely ones that they’d rather forget as companies laid off employees and struggled to deal with the ravages of the recession. But for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the past year has been a pretty good one financially: Red Hat is set to report its fourth-quarter fiscal 2010 revenues after the market close today and the forecast is positive.
Red Hat has been showing sales growth every quarter so far during its fiscal year. In its first quarter of fiscal 2010, ended May 31, 2009, Red Hat reported an 11 percent year-over-year increase in revenues. Next quarter, a similar story: Year-over-year revenue growth of 12 percent. Next quarter: Red Hat blew out expectations with 18 percent year-over-year revenue growth and before-charges earnings of $0.17 per share, a penny ahead of Wall Street consensus.