Cloud Usage Drives Red Hat Revenue Growth

With its time as an independent company drawing to a close, Red Hat reported double-digit revenue growth for the fourth quarter and full year of 2019.

Fourth quarter revenue was $879 million, up 14% year-over-year, and full fiscal 2019 revenue was $3.4 billion, up 15%, in the quarter ending February 28.

CEO Jim Whitehurst credited the growth to enterprises moving to hybrid cloud environments -- good news for telcos and other network providers, who can expect to see increased demand for connectivity and other services connecting enterprises to all those clouds.

The total number of Red Hat customers with active subscriptions greater than $5 million increased 33% year-over-year, with Ansible and OpenShift customers numbering more than 1,300 and 1,000 respectively, the company said in a statement. Ansible is an open source automation language for continuous automation and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and OpenShift is Red Hat's Kubernetes platform for containerized applications.

Additionally, the company saw 17% increase in the number of deals over $1 million.

Red Hat reported earnings of $1.16 per share of revenue, beating Wall Street's expectation of $1.01. However, revenue fell short of expectations; it reported $879 million versus the expected $883.9 million.

IBM is in the process of acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion, in a deal announced in October. (See How Red Hat Could Give IBM's Telco Strategy a New Lease of Life .)

— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading

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