How Red Hat Can Take Cloud Market Share Away From Its Key Rival

Recently, Red Hat Inc RHT has taken a back seat to Ubuntu in low cost cloud infrastructure. Ubuntu Linux has been a key rival of Red Hat and has experienced major success in capturing cloud infrastructure totaling to over a 65 percent share of all cloud server operating system instances.

Deutsche Bank's Karl Keirstead commented on Red Hat's potential to fulfill its opportunities in cloud infrastructure. Keirstead's comments came after he met with Ubuntu company management.

According to the Deutsche Bank analyst, Redhat argues Ubuntu clients will become more reliant on the operating system layer in the future as many of them are only starting out now. Once these clients grow accustomed to cloud services, Red Hat's superior operating system layer will become more relevant.

This would allow Redhat to close the cloudshare gaps with Ubuntu according to company management.

In addition, the analyst believed Red Hat would need to lower its cloud Linux prices in order to effectively compete with Ubuntu.

"Bottom line, RHT's relatively low overall share on AWS is a concern, but RHT's share of PAID server OS instances is much higher, RHT's 90% growth in cloud subscription revs suggests that RHT is indeed monetizing this opportunity and we do believe that RHT's share will rise as production workloads transition," stated Keirstead.

According to TipRanks, Keirstead has a 64 percent success rating and a +8.9 percent average return per recommendation. The analyst is ranked 202 out of 4,110 analyst's.

Keirstead has a Buy rating on Red Hat with a $95 price target. At time of writing, Red Hat traded at $74.64.