RedHat sales surge

RedHat says it is closing in on its $1 billion turnover goal after a 15% surge in annual sales, according to Channel Web.

Its annual subscription revenue rose 18% to $639 million, while net profit rose 11% to $87.3 million. Red Hat says it added more than 350 employees throughout the year, mainly in engineering and sales positions.

Nigel Wright, UK sales director at value added retailer Abtech, explains that larger, higher-profile end-users, including global oil companies, were beginning to consider open source applications as a genuine option.

The National IT Industry Promotion Agency in Korea disclosed results of research regarding the open source software industry, states Korea Times.

Out of the four categories assessed, Korea ranked fourth with national policies for open source software, sixth in overall environment and seventh for use of the software. Korea ranked 24th out of 58 countries when looking at open source communities.

According to Gartner, the world's market for open source software is expected to grow to more than $63.4 billion next year. Experts note the lack of hi-tech industry leadership is at least partially responsible for the sluggish development of the country's IT industry over the past few years.

RedHat has released updates for its JBoss offerings with SOA, Web server and developer tools, writes Server Watch.

The open source company updated its JBoss SOA Platform 5.0, Enterprise Web Platform 5.0 and JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) 3.0 software, citing the upgrades provide optimisations to the products to enhance usability.

"The theme of the announcement is giving IT greater productivity, visibility and control," says Pierre Fricke, Red Hat's JBoss SOA. "Developer and administrator productivity have been improved and that's important from a cost and time-to-market perspective."