Sam Varghese
Thursday, 03 April 2008 21:38
Opinion and Analysis
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Max McLaren sounds very satisified these days. Not to say that the man who's been managing Red Hat's affairs in Australia and New Zealand for nearly two years has sounded disconsolate at any time when I've spoken to him.
But right now he has very good reason to be feeling a trifle smug - Red Hat recently released
an extraordinary set of figures for the first US quarter.
At a time when all the talk is about economic gloom and doom and the subprime mortgage crisis, if a company comes out with figures which indicate the growth of services revenue by 29 per cent and subscriptions by 27 percent, it's no wonder that the financial analysts start singing hallelujah. The breakup for the earnings shows 57 percent coming from North America, 28 percent from Europe and the Middle East and 15 percent from the Asia-Pacific region.
(That isn't the only thing that's making McLaren smile. The rugby team he barracks for in the Super 14 competition - the Sharks, who were pipped at the post in last year's final by another South African team, the Bulls - is sitting second on
the ladder midway through the round robin stage and is looking very much like it will see finals action in the last week of May.)
However, for the moment, the rugby is a sideshow. McLaren is obviously buoyed by the five continuous quarters of growth for Red Hat - which have come in the face of Novell's bid to seize marketshare by getting into bed with Microsoft; and in the face of Oracle trying to steal Red Hat's thunder by selling its own distribution called Unbreakable Linux on which the database can be run.
The logic is supposed to be that Oracle can support its own database on Linux better than Red Hat can support Oracle's product. It looks like the message isn't getting through - or maybe the Red Hat people are simply better.
Red Hat is small compared to all these companies but it has one major advantage in the business Linux space - as Mclaren himself put it
the last time we spoke: "Open source is Red Hat's primary business. For the others it is an ancillary."
(There's no mention of free software by McLaren but I guess that when you have people like Alan Cox on the rolls, you can leave it to such people to do the talking. There are few better ambassadors for FOSS than Cox and hardly anybody who has better credentials to talk about it.)
