Red Hat posts positive financials, cites CoreOS acquisition as key

Another day, another earnings report where cloud is cited as the primary mover. This time it’s Red Hat, whose fourth quarter and full year revenues have gone up 23% and 21% year over year respectively.

Full year revenues were at $2.9 billion (£2.05bn) while fourth quarter total revenue was at $772 million (£546.4m). The company’s subscription revenue from infrastructure-related offerings was at $510m for the most recent quarter, representing two thirds of total revenue, while total subscription revenue was 88% of overall revenue.

The key highlight for Red Hat over the past quarter was the acquisition of CoreOS, a provider of Kubernetes and container solutions, for $250m in January. The move was cited by president and CEO Jim Whitehurst when speaking to analysts and, on a wider scale, the importance of container technologies for Red Hat going forward.

“The acquisition of CoreOS further enhances our ability to help customers build applications and deploy them across hybrid environments,” said Whitehurst, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including OpenShift, we aim to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.”

Back in 2016, this reporter attended the London Red Hat Forum where open source software reigned supreme. At that time, Red Hat saw itself as the #2 player in Kubernetes and Docker. The company remains the second leading contributor to Kubernetes, which itself has gone from strength to strength, ‘graduating’ from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this month.

“We continue to believe that the next era of technology will be driven by container-based applications that span multi and hybrid cloud environments and that Kubernetes, containers and Linux will be the foundation of this transformation,” added Whitehurst.

You can read the full results here.