June 29th, 2007
Time to get off Red Hat's case?
Red Hat is a company that is easy to dislike.
Maybe it’s the relationship with IBM. Maybe it’s the way they absorbed JBOSS. Maybe it’s CEO Matthew Szulik, or the proprietary way in which the company operates.
Maybe it’s because they’re based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and don’t schmooze the Silicon Valley press corps, which has something in common with that of Washington, D.C.
Whatever, I think it’s time we got off Red Hat’s case. The company delivered another solid quarter yesterday, helped out by channel partners and bigger JBOSS subscription sales.
The company probably goosed those JBOSS sales further with its acquisition of MetaMatrix, which specializes in metadata and data services. That sale closed this week.
Red Hat is never going to be Mr. Pinstripe Suit, Mr. hi-dee-hi-dee-ho. They don’t roll that way in Raleigh. But it’s a solid Linux vendor, in the center of the enterprise space, it continues to grow, it does its bit for the open source movement, and maybe that’s enough.
What else do you expect from them?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/30/07
