Open Source champion Red Hat is continuing to make a killing despite the downturn in the IT industry and fears that governments and industry are cutting their budgets, According to the outfit's financial results for the second quarter revenue for the quarter was $281.3 million, an increase of 28 per cent from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $238.3 million, up 28 per cent year-over-year.

Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said that strong sales execution and customer demand were to blame. We always find executing sales people helps any company. However, it seems Red Hat outdid itself. "We continued to win and strengthen relationships with enterprise customers who partner with Red Hat to reduce costs while modernising their IT infrastructure to enable applications to run on bare metal, virtualisation and in the cloud,” Whitehurst said.

He thinks that based on the strong first half results, Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor. Net income for the quarter was $40.0 million compared with $23.7 million last year. Charlie Peters, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Red Hat said that investments in sales and R&D are paying off and producing market share gains, higher revenue and 30 per cent year-over-year billings growth.