Red Hat reports 28% increase in revenue over the last year

Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2012 second quarter ended August 31, 2011.

Total revenue for the quarter was $281.3 million, an increase of 28% from the year ago quarter and Subscription revenue for the quarter was $238.3 million, up 28% year-over-year, the company reported.

“The combination of strong sales execution and customer demand led to second quarter revenue that was above our guidance and represented our fourth straight quarter of accelerating revenue growth,” stated Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. “We continued to win and strengthen relationships with enterprise customers who partner with Red Hat to reduce costs while modernising their lT infrastructure to enable applications to run on bare metal, virtualization and in the cloud. Based on the strong first half results, we believe Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor.”

According to Red Hat, net income for the quarter was $40.0 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, compared with $23.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter. After adjusting for stock compensation and amortisation expenses, non-GAAP net income for the quafter was $56.5 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, as compared to $36.8 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter.

Both GAAP and non-GAAP net income for the quarter included a discrete tax benefit of $2.1 million, approximately $0.01 per diluted share, the company said. Excluding this tax benefit, GAAP earnings per share would have been $0.19 and non-GAAP earnings per share would have been $0.28 for the quarter.

Operating cash flow was $77.1 million for the second quarter, as compared to $64.3 million in the year ago quafter, the company added. At quarter end, the company’s total deferred revenue balance was $813.2 million, an increase of 25% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of August 31,2011, was $l.3 billion, Red Hat said.

“Our investments in sales and R&D continued to pay off, producing market share gains, higher revenue and 30% year-over-year billings growth,” stated Charlie Peters, Executive VP and CFO of Red Hat. “Our productivity continued to improve as evidenced by non-GAAP operating income growth of 41% and cash flow growth of 20% in Q2. Moreover, year-to-date non-GAAP operating income grew 35% and operating cash flow grew 34% compared to the first half of last fiscal year.”