Red Hat has smashed through the billion dollar revenue barrier, becoming the first open source company to do so.
Revenue for 2012 came in at $1.13bn, up an impressive 25% on the previous year’s figures. Net income from the year was $146.6m, up from $107.3m the year before. For the fourth quarter, revenue climbed 21% to $297m, while net income stood at $36m, a slight dip on the $38.2m recorded this quarter last year.
Despite that slight black spot, CEO Jim Whitehurst was understandably delighted with the results.
"The strength of our fourth quarter was a fitting conclusion to a remarkably strong year for our business," he said in a statement.
Jim Whitehurst
"Red Hat is the first pure-play, open source company, and one of only a select few software companies, to have achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone. The open source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centres for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement," the statement added.
Red Hat offers a variety of open source technologies, most famously its Enterprise Linux operating system. It also offers virtualisation, where it challenges the likes of Citrix and Microsoft, cloud and middleware technology. The majority of its revenue comes from selling licences for the open source software.
CBR spoke to CEO Jim Whitehurst a while ago. During the interview he spoke of his vision for the company and what he felt he had to do to get Red Hat to the billion dollar revenue marker. You can listen to the podcast in full here.
