Red Hat CEO: 'Cloud Adoption Is Happening Faster Than People Thought'

Open Source software firm Red Hat Inc RHT reported its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon, following which shares of the company were trading up in the premarket. Revenues for the fourth-quarter stood at $464 million, up 16 percent year-over-year, while GAAP EPS was $0.26, compared to $0.24 the company reported in the same quarter last year.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO, was on CNBC Thursday to discuss the company's results and adoption of the cloud.

Move Of Applications Good For Us

"There was strength across the board, which even surprised us," Whitehurst said. "It's a reflection of the fact that cloud adoption is happening faster than people thought it would happen in the enterprise and we play in both public and private cloud and we are just seeing a significant move of applications to this new environment. So when that happens, that's good for us."

Typically Our Software

Whitehurst was asked what changes he is seeing at the corporate level which is contributing to faster adoption of the cloud. He replied, "Right, there is two things. One is certainly [we] tried to take cost out, but I think even more important than that is almost any enterprise is begetting to define themselves as a digital enterprise, which requires that they build capabilities to put out applications either for their sales forces or directly to their customers or for their suppliers, even faster."

"And the new deployment models that allow you to do that more quickly require new infrastructure and that infrastructure is typically open-source and it's typically our open-source software," Whitehurst concluded.