Red Hat Revenues Grow, Raises Full Year Outlook

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Red Hat is starting off its fiscal 2012 year with a bang. The open source vendor reported its first quarter fiscal 2012 earnings on Wednesday night with double digit revenue gains.

Red Hat’s strong financial performance is coming on the back of growth in both its operating system platform, cloud and middleware product offerings.

“Fiscal year 2012 is off to a great start with broad demand from enterprise customers who are driving a fundamental shift in the delivery of IT services,” Red Hat CFO, Charlie Peters said during the company’s earnings call.

For the its fiscal year 2012 first quarter ended May 31, 2011, Red Hat reported net revenue of $264.7 million for a 26 percent year-over-year increase. Net Income was reported at 66.5 million, for a 28 percent year-over-year increase. Red Hat exceeded its own revenue guidance, which it provided in fourth quarter, for first quarter 2012 revenues to be in the range of $252 to $255 million.

Moving forward, Red Hat provided second quarter fiscal 2012 revenue guidance to be in the range of approximately $270 million to $272 million. Red Hat is so optimistic about the year that it is also raising its full year revenue guidance as well. In March, Peters forecast Red Hat’s full fiscal 2012 revenues to come in between $1.05 and $1.7 billion.

“As for the full year, given our strong Q1 actual results and Q2 guidance well above expectations, we are comfortable raising our revenue guidance to a range of $1.07 billion to $1.085 billion,” Peters said.

In terms of where the money is coming from, Peters noted that during the first quarter Red Hat we had 14 deals over $1 million or greater, including one deal in excess of $5 million. He add that within the top 30, approximately 40 percent included a middleware component, with 5 being standalone middleware deals.

“I think you can probably tell by the overall numbers that RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] was strong since it’s a really very large portion of the total business,” Peters said. “Having said that, JBoss also performed quite well. They represented 40 percent of the top 30 deals. So it was really hitting on all cylinders.”

Going a level deeper, Red Hat continues to make the bulk of its revenues from software subscriptions. Peters noted that subscription revenue, which is renewable, constituted 85 percent of total revenue.

“The training and services component of revenue was $39 million, up 30 percent from last year and up 10 percent sequentially,” Peters said. “This is encouraging since this type of business generally leads to additional future subscriptions.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.