Red Hat, the open source software company, reported earnings of $32.5 million during the first quarter of 2011 on revenue of $264 million, an increase of 27 per cent from a year ago.

This is a reinforcement of strong performances during previous quarters by the company, in an environment where firms have returned to spending on IT infrastructure and data centre upgrades.

Red Hat is also currently well positioned due to the increasing use of its core product, the Red Hat variant of the Linux operating system. Linux is currently being used increasingly at the expense of Unix and this has been reflected in Red Hat's performance for the quarter.

"The strong demand we experienced this quarter came in part from enterprise customers who are looking to Red Hat to upgrade and modernise their IT infrastructure," said Charles Peters, executive and vice president of Red Hat.

The company is well placed to take advantage of the current cloud computing developments, having launched two new products tailor-made for companies making the switch.

Open Shift enables developers to build a set of applications for use in the cloud through platform-as-a-service. The company's other new offering, Cloud Forms, purports to be a "comprehensive resource management solution" delivered as infrastructure-as-a-service.

Paul Cormier, Red Hat's Executive Vice President and President of Products and Technologies, said these new products will enhance the company's position at the forefront of the cloud computing software market.

"We believe that these new infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service solutions further enhance our position as a strategic vendor for cloud technologies and the clear market leader from an open source perspective," he said.

Written by Chris Tate
 

A confident Red Hat posts strong first quarter performance