Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst delivered a glowing report about the company’s performance Wednesday.
In discussing an earnings report that topped analysts’ expectations and sent Red Hat shares skyward in after-hours trading, Whitehurst spelled out several highlights.
A portion of his remarks delivered in a conference call with analysts as provided by the website Seeking Alpha:
“First, our platform offerings had a tremendous quarter, with record billings and the highest Q4 growth rate in three years.
“We experienced broad demand across our top verticals, as well as from new mainstream customers.
“From a competitive perspective, we won many deals this quarter against other operating systems, including UNIX, Windows, clones and other Linux brands.
“An interesting example was a win with the Qatar Stock Exchange, where we replaced Windows with RHEL. The customer cited better security and reliability as two of the main considerations. This adds another exchange to the list of the world’s equity trading platforms that use Linux.
“Our middleware solutions also had a strong quarter as companies reassessed their traditional vendors and are increasingly choosing Red Hat’s higher value alternatives. In December, IDC published a commission white paper surveying a number of large U.S. enterprises that switched to JBoss.
“On average, the companies in the study reduced time and developer hours to develop custom applications. They reduced their infrastructure and management costs and were able to develop 50 percent more applications per year. Over a three-year period, these companies generated an [return on investment] of over 500 percent and paid back their initial investments in less than six months.
“In the cloud space, we grew the number of customers using our RHEV [Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization] product to over 500. We announced the availability of RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] on Fujitsu’s On-Demand Virtual System Service. And we closed a renewal this quarter with a large cloud provider that was a 300 percent increase from their prior commitment.
“Moving onto renewals.
“For the quarter, we renewed 24 of the top 25 deals scheduled to renew this quarter and those that renewed did so at over 130 percent of the prior year’s value. For the year, we were 99 out of 100, with an upsell of well over 120 percent of the prior-year value. This clearly demonstrates the value our largest customers see in relationship with Red Hat.”
For more about the earnings, read here.
For the transcript of the conference call, read here.
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