As Red Hat basks in the glory of making more than a billion dollars off a free open source project, some are questioning where the company will go after RHEL. Is there a rush? No. The company gets about 80% of its $1.3 billion in revenues from a category that’s headlined by RHEL, and while those subscriptions aren’t going away any time soon.
Growth, however, is leveling off (13% last year). The company’s other newer products grew at a much faster 38% rate, but they’re a much smaller portion of the business, headlined by OpenStack and OpenShift and those projects are in the early days. There’s no reason the company can’t do with OpenStack what it did with Linux. There’s also no guarantee that Red Hat will be the company that comes to the forefront to be the “Red Hat of OpenStack.”