Red Hat doffs cap to $1bn revenue goal

Open-source vendor claims cloud is fuelling its revenue growth

Red Hat claims it will become the first open-source vendor to hit the $1bn revenue mark during its next financial year.

The vendor's prediction is based on the outcome of its latest set of financial results, which puts the firm's full-year revenues at $909.3m.

Red Hat's subscription revenues totalled $773.4m, a year-on-year increase of 21 per cent.

The results also show the firm's fourth-quarter revenues were up 25 per cent on last year at $244.8m. Its subscription revenues grew by a similar amount and topped $209.3m.

Jim Whitehurst, chief executive of Red Hat, attributed the firm's performance to the growing interest in cloud computing.

"With record bookings and billings in the fourth quarter, we are on a run rate to become the first pure-play open-source company to achieve a billion dollars in revenues next fiscal year," said Whitehurst.

"We believe the strong demand we experienced was largely driven by customers who are modernising their datacentres and preparing infrastructure for cloud computing."

Charlie Peters, executive vice president at Red Hat, said the demand for the company's products and services was growing worldwide.

"This year we focused on growth with aggressive hiring for sales and engineering, launched major product releases, and invested in technologies focused on cloud computing," said Peters.

"These investments produced greater than 20 per cent growth in revenues for both the quarter and the year."