Linux distributor Red Hat made a killing last year, according to its latest figures. The company has begun fiscal year 2012 with a first quarter growth of 28 per cent.

Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said the money was at the high end of the outfit's expectations. Net income for the quarter was $32.5 million compared with $24.1 million a year ago. All this is happening as the IT hardware makers are still in the doledrums.

He said that there is a fundamental shift in IT spending, in which cloud computing and virtualisation have become key strategic priorities. We guess the good side of the cloud is that you do not have to buy much hardware.

He thinks Red Hat is well positioned to capitalise on all this as enterprise customers look to Red Hat when upgrading and modernising their IT infrastructure.