What To Expect From The Red Hat Summit

In a report published Monday, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian J. White maintained a Buy rating on Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT), with a price target of $90, ahead of the Red Hat Summit. Analyst Brian White expects the Red Hat story "to shine bright" at the Summit, with the company's expanding portfolio opening up "new growth opportunities within the open source world." With the rising importance of software versus hardware in next generation data centers as well as open innovation gaining momentum, Red Hat appears to be "an attractive play on the open source software movement."The trend toward open source software "is clearly in vogue" and Red Hat being a leading provider of open source software solutions "positions the company well for the build out of next generation data centers and new opportunities across the cloud computing landscape," White wrote."At the Red Hat Summit this week, we expect OpenStack to be a key theme and an exciting new growth area for Red Hat in the coming years…we believe Red Hat's strong reputation across the open source community, given its success in the Linux market, will prove beneficial in the OpenStack market," the Cantor Fitzgerald report noted.451 Research estimates the OpenStack technology market to expand from $883 million in 2014 to $3.3 billion in 2018, at an annual growth rate of nearly 40 percent.