Red Hat

By CIO New Zealand staff | Monday, January 11 2010

Red Hat supplies open-source technology, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and a broad range of management and services, to enterprises globally.

Global HQ: Raleigh, North Carolina, US
Website: www.redhat.com
Global leader: Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO
Local leader: Max McLaren, MD, Australia and New Zealand
Core activity: Operating systems, middleware and services
Revenue: US$653 million (FY08-09 ended February 28)
Key customers: Yellow Pages, University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, Television New Zealand, Datamail, GNS Science, NIWA, New Zealand Post, Bank of New Zealand, New York Stock Exchange, Amazon.com, DreamWorks,
Morgan Stanley, Western Power, Infoplex, Centrebet
Employees: 2500

The recent admission by Microsoft that open-source champion Red Hat is considered a competitor in the non-server space has further legitimised the Linux distributor as a serious Windows-client rival. Linux is increasingly being used on netbooks, is giving full-scale notebooks a run for their money and is gaining traction on the desktop.

Red Hat supplies open-source technology, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and a broad range of management and services, to enterprises globally.

Many leading IT organisations in Australia and New Zealand keep the fact they use Linux under the radar, not only because it gives them a competitive edge, but because the corporate sector has taken time to gain trust in open source.

Red Hat is expanding its reseller base and gaining more enterprises this year with its supercharged Enterprise Linux, certified for the latest blade servers from IBM and optimised for virtualisation, security and systems
support. Keith Newman