Interactive Ideas grows by third

Distributor joins £30m club after strong open-source sales

Distributor Interactive Ideas has held up a 32 per cent spike in annual sales as further evidence of the strength of the open-source market.

The Red Hat ally achieved a £32m revenue haul for its financial year to 30 April.

Although the distributor generates a third of its sales from Red Hat and Novell, marketing director Michael Breeze said emerging vendors such as SolarWinds and EnterpriseDB had also performed well during the year.

"Since Oracle bought MySQL, EnterpriseDB is pretty much the only open-source database alternative to Oracle," he said.

Interactive Ideas is divided into two sides, with one division selling infrastructure software to a database of about 750 VARs and the other stocking boxed software for the retail market.

The distributor also recently launched a service to help US vendors get a foothold in continental Europe.

"We have 18 people with language skills so we can act as a hub for new vendors," said Breeze. "We have sold into 25 different territories for SolarWinds."