With Cloud Inititiatives and Partners, Red Hat Is Marching Forward

As it ramps up to become the first billion dollar a year open source company, Red Hat is expanding its cloud-based strategy, and citing strong partnerships as fueling the company's momentum. At the Red Hat Summit this week, the company discussed new IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, including CloudForms, which provides application management tools that help bring applications into the cloud, and OpenShift, which supports many development environments for delivering applications in the cloud. It's also clear from the comments Red Hat officials are making that channel partners are backing Red Hat's cloud strategy.

According to ServerWatch:

"OpenShift supports multiple development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby that include Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE... [while] CloudForms includes application management tools that will help bring applications into the cloud as well as manage applications in the cloud."

Meanwhile, The Register notes that:

"Red Hat has amassed over 6,000 channel partners globally and that they account for between 60 and 65 per cent of Red Hat's aggregate revenues every quarter. In some geographical areas, like in the Asia/Pacific region, more than 90 per cent of the company's business comes through partners, not its direct sales force."

In the spirit of Tom Sawyer convincing his friends to whitewash the fence for him, Red Hat's increasing market muscle is allowing it to get channel partners to promote its business initiatives on their own. All of this is likely to help make Red Hat the first open source-centric company to surpass a billion dollars in revenues, and it will probably cross that threshold this year. We noted this upon Red Hat's last sterling quarterly report. 

"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, a milestone achievement for Red Hat and the open source community," said Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat, upon its latest report, in a statement. "We believe the strong demand we experienced was largely driven by customers who are modernizing their data centers and preparing their infrastructure for cloud computing. The comprehensive portfolio that Red Hat has developed with platform, virtualization and middleware products provides enterprise customers with a foundation to deploy the next generation infrastructure." 

With ramped up cloud-based efforts and strong channel partners, Red Hat has momentum. However, it is also benefiting from perceptions surrounding the fact that it is the only pure open source company left standing as an independent public company, following the acquisitions of Sun and Novell. Look for more momentum from Red Hat in the second half of this year.