Red Hat Up 3% On Earnings Beat

Red Hat, Inc.

shares are jumping more than 3% after the company reported better than expected quarterly earnings. The company reported first quarter earnings of 24 cents per share on $264.7 million in revenues. Wall Street had been expecting earnings of 22 cents per share on $253.58 million in revenues. “Red Hat has begun fiscal year 2012 with a strong first quarter including year-over-year billings growth of 28% that contributed to revenue and profitability that exceeded the high-end of our expectations,” stated Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. “We believe there is a fundamental shift in IT spending, in which cloud computing and virtualization have become key strategic priorities. We believe that Red Hat is well positioned to capitalize on this growing demand as enterprise customers look to Red Hat when upgrading and modernizing their IT infrastructure.” “Strong sales execution, focused spending and good collections drove 49% growth in operating cash flow year-over-year,” stated Charlie Peters, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Red Hat. “Red Hat grew first quarter non-GAAP operating income by 28% year-over-year even as we ramped up marketing spending for the Red Hat Summit and product launches, and continued investments in R&D to enable further broadening of our product portfolio. We introduced innovative new cloud technologies such as OpenShift, our PaaS offering, and CloudForms, our IaaS offering. In addition, we enhanced our core products, including the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and strengthened our partnerships with the launch of Open Virtualization Alliance.”