After being pounded in the market when its Linux solution was left out of Microsoft’s alliance with alternative Linux shop Novell, Red Hat has finally gotten a break. Nokia has chosen Red Hat’s Linux software system for it network server platforms.While Red Hat has more market share in the Linus OS business than Novell, the deal, with its huge marketing support, boosted a flagging Novell.Red Hat’s stock has fallen from $32 in May to its current price of under $17. But, the stock may have run too far, too fast before that. It stood at under $11 in May 2005, so it had tripled in a year.Wall St. should not forget that Red Hat is nicely profitable, and growing. In the last reported quarter ending August 31, the company did just shy of $100 million, and had an operating profit of over $9 million. Revenue had gone up each of the three immediate quarters.Novell’s deal with Microsoft may put it too close to the huge software company that many enterprise customers do not trust. Microsoft has made “land grabs” in the past, and companies like Nokia may elect to use Red Hat over the rival “Novell brought to you by Microsoft” Linux solution.For Red Hat, not all the news is bad.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
Red Hat Gets A Break, Finally (RHAT)(NOK)(MSFT)(NOVL)
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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