VARBusiness: Red Hat inserts Linux into enterprise user Hinterland

[Saidi Net News] varbusiness magazine commented that with the development of open-source software, one of the Linux banners is red hat) the company announced its strong second-quarter financial report to the outside world. The entire enterprise software market showed a slump, and the Red Hat against the trend created a good industry, statistics show that the company is now targeting enterprise users with higher yields.

RedHat recently announced the company's revenue report for the second quarter, which shows the company's current situation to the fullest-roughly the same as that in the open source software field, redhat's revenue in the quarter has been significantly improved, but it still needs to prove to the entire market that its current position is completely a manifestation of its strength, especially for SMB channel partners.

According to the company's report, revenue in the second quarter of the fiscal year of 2005 reached $46.3 million, up almost 60 percentage points from the same period last year, and 11 percentage points from the first quarter of this year. The company's net income for the quarter amounted to $11.8 million, equivalent to 6 cents per share, up nearly 225% from a year ago, up 8% from the first quarter. Operating profit reached $6.7 million, accounting for 15% of total revenue. At the same time, the company's Red Hat Linux Enterprise software sales reached 144000, including sales of 115000 enterprise IT Server versions. The latter is mainly composed of three parts, new users, users who need to update services and 290 million HPC desktop market users.

RedHat is actively developing its own Marketing Partner Expansion Project. The company's main partner list now includes many large OEMs and isV companies, such as BEA, Oracle, HP, IBM Dell, Fujitsu, sybase, Veritas, and so on.

Newly Added to Unisys, in March August this year, it signed an agreement with RedHat to install Redhat's Linux operating system compatible with its server products on its latest es7000 Enterprise Server. (At the same time, Unisys also uses Novell's SuSE Linux as the operating system of its server products .)

"We haven't found a proper version of Linux until recently," Derek, Linux project manager at Unisys, said. However, he further pointed out that with the release of core 2.6 versions, maybe Linux will make a difference in the high-end field of servers. He also expressed strong confidence in the prospects of RedHat.

"RedHat is undoubtedly a very good partner," Derek said. "Two years ago, he was completely in another situation. Everything went wrong, but it was just a short time, we are now a tacit partner in many fields."

However, this quarter's exciting financial report still failed to ensure the outstanding performance of RedHat in the stock market. The company's share price fell by nearly thirteen percent on Tuesday, at the same time, the market analysis company UBS also lowered the company's expected stock trend accordingly. Redhat's company ordered revenue for the second quarter to be about $33.9 million, which is much lower than UBS's expectation of $36.9 million. On the other hand, UBS also pointed out that so far, the Red Hat management did not disclose any information about the average prices of the company's products.

A report shows that UBS's comment on Redhat's stock market has changed from "buy" to "hold ", however, another Wall Street research company, JMP securities, still gave RedHat stocks an outstanding comment, he believes that Redhat's retention of information mainly takes into account the press conference held in New York in September 30, and UBS's concerns mainly come from the appointment of Redhat's new CFO Charlie Peter, the latter just took office this quarter.

The current situation of RedHat is very different from that of the entire enterprise software market. The recent financial reports provided by many software companies in the market have left investors disappointed, in addition, they have little effect after making various efforts to expand their partners to increase sales. At the same time, with the step-by-step growth of open-source Linux, copyright and other issues that plague its development will be resolved accordingly, at that time, Linux may become the target of many established teams in the enterprise software field.

"From the current situation, RedHat has aligned its main partners with those large companies," said Starnix, president of a Linux software company in Toronto.

From: SCID