RedHat’s Earnings Jump; Buys Storage Company

Profits for number one Linux distributor RedHat soared during its fiscal third quarter of 2004 to $4.1 million (2 cents per share), a difference of about eighteen hundred percent from the same time last year.

Net income during the same quarter last year was $214,000, or break-even.

The company made the announcement on the same day it released earnings that showed its revenue was $33.1 million, a 36 percent jump over the same year-ago fiscal third quarter.

The revenues were up by 15 percent over the $28.8 million that it took in during the second quarter of fiscal 2004.

It also announced that it has reached a deal to acquire storage infrastructure software company, Sistina Software, for about $31 million in stock.

Sistina is expected to play a major role in Red Hat’s Open Source Architecture strategy, company officials said, by providing Enterprise Linux customers a path to virtualization and vendor-independent storage solutions.