Red Hat Plummets Following Q3 Earnings Release

Shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) are trading lower in the after-hours following the release of the company's Q3 earnings results. Currently, shares are lower by 7.49%, trading at $42.14; they ended the regular session lower by 3.34%, at $46.05. Red Hat reported Q3 non-GAAP EPS of $0.28 on revenues of $290 million. Revenues increased 23% year over year. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $246.5 million, up 24% year-over-year.At quarter end, the company's total deferred revenue balance was $819.6 million, an increase of 20% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of November 30, 2011 was $1.2 billion."Red Hat continues to benefit from enterprise customers that are seeking to leverage their IT infrastructure to drive significant productivity gains and agility across their organizations. The combination of strong sales execution, market demand and market share gains contributed to organic billings and revenue growth of 23% for the quarter," stated Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. "We also recently completed the acquisition and integration of Gluster, including the launch of our first Red Hat branded storage product for unstructured data. We will continue to expand our storage solutions in cloud computing and big data storage, and believe that Red Hat is well positioned to deliver disruptive solutions in the large and growing storage market."Red Hat, Inc. is engaged in providing open source software solutions to the enterprise, including its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.