Even as the economy has stayed in the doldrums, Red Hat continues to post strong quarterly financial results. Late Wednesday, the company reported first quarter revenues of $174.4 million, up 11 percent from $156.6 million a year earlier. Profits were also up, with quarterly earnings of $18.5 million, or 10 cents a share, up from a profit of $17.3 million, or 8 cents a share, for the same quarter last year.

"Red Hat’s growth is driven in part by our ability to help enterprise customers save money in a challenging IT spending environment," said CEO Jim Whitehurst. "Our open source solutions drive new capabilities, efficiencies and functionality into the mission critical infrastructure of our customers.” Red Hat's total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of May 31, 2009 sat at a whopping $884.5 million, which is more evidence of the investment savvy that Whitehurst and Red Hat's top brass have.

Recently, we wrote about Dell's intent to bundle open source applications on computers for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The pre-configured "SMB-in-a-box" software bundles are targeted to make it easier for customers to become familiar with and use open source applications and platforms. As InfoWorld noted recently, though, Forrester and other market researchers have found that SMBs are apphrehensive about open source. Will Dell succeed with its strategy, and could it build support businesses around the offerings?

I recently got the opportunity to speak with the crew at Bluenog. Bluenog provides tailored integrated collaborative environments (ICE), content management portals and business intelligence solutions built on open source core technologies, offering a hybrid of open source and commercial features and support services.

With online collaboration becoming standard operating procedure, and the still delicate state of the economy, Bluenog, like other companies supplying and supporting open source software, has seen a heightened interest in its services. In particular, Bluenog has seen a growth in open source adoption (and commercial support services) in the higher education market.

Bluenog currently has three prominent clients in academia -- Wellesley, Columbia and NYU. I had a chance to ask the team at Bluenog about the challenges, special considerations, and the road ahead for open source companies in the higher education sector.