The VAR Guy

How serious is Red Hat about pushing beyond Linux? Take a look at Red Hat’s latest quarterly results, disclosed yesterday, and a cloud seminar that’s set for today. You’ll get a feel for how the open source company is striving to reinvent its business amid a march toward $1 billion in annual revenues.

First, the earnings release. First-quarter revenues rose 27 percent to $265 million. Assuming Red Hat doesn’t suffer any serious setbacks this year, the company could be on pace to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues. And increasingly, Red Hat is pushing beyond Linux.

Take a closer look at the main body of the Red Hat earnings release and you’ll see an interesting pattern:

• Three mentions of cloud computing.
• Two mentions of virtualization.
• One mention of Linux.
• No mentions of JBoss, Red Hat’s open source middleware platform.

Simple conclusion: Red Hat, like so many other vendors, is trying to ride the cloud and virtualization waves. But the ride won’t be easy.

On the one hand, Red Hat is relatively tiny compared to Microsoft, VMware and other companies that are pumping out new cloud and virtualization platforms. But on the other hand Red Hat seems to be making some progress with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which is built atop KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), an open source offering. The so-called Open Virtualization Alliance, which promotes KVM, now boasts 65 members.

Red Hat also is betting heavily on OpenShift (platform as a service) and CloudForms (Infrastructure as a Service).

Where do channel partners fit into the discussion? Red Hat has been busy promoting Cloud Foundations education to help VARs and service providers develop cloud strategies.

More information will likely surface today, when Red Hat offers a public update on its cloud strategy. The VAR Guy will be listening closely as the open source company takes its latest step to extend from Linux into cloud computing and virtualization.

Disclosure: The author of this blog owns 150 shares of Red Hat.

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