red hat inc

In the past two years we've seen a number of changes in the world of Ruby webapp deployment, but have you heard of Torquebox?

Built upon the Red Hat Inc.

IT Channel Planet: "Open source software developer Red Hat Inc., riding a six-fold uptick in partner membership, recently bolstered its channel program by adding a new top tier, three specializations and a raft of sales, marketing and technical benefits."

A preview of Fedora 10 is now available for download from the Fedora website, with improved virtualization, package management and policy controls, and faster startups.

Red Hat Inc. reported second-quarter revenues of $164.4 million, an increase of 29% in  quarterly revenue compared with a year ago, at $127.2 million.

Deferred revenue rose somewhat faster, climbing 32% to $496.9 million. Quarterly profits also rose, but by a slimmer margin, rising 11% from $18.2 million for the second fiscal quarter of 2007 to $21.1 million for the second fiscal quarter of 2008.

The quarter’s revenues included two one-year sales of $5 million apiece.

Novell Inc.’s recent coup of achieving bidirectional virtualization with Microsoft’s Hyper-V — SUSE Linux Enterprise can run as a guest on Hyper-V and Hyper-V on SUSE — is a huge step forward for interoperability.

Less than a week after Red Hat Inc.’s surprise $107 million purchase of Qumranet Inc., I remain mystified by this acquisition.

Qumranet is the Israeli-based creator of the KVM open source hypervisor, which is incorporated into the Linux kernel; SolidIce virtual desktop, which Qumranet launched earlier this year but has yet to gain serious traction, and Spice, a super-fast communications protocol for transmitting bandwidth-heavy multimedia content at high speed that other vendors currently can’t match.

Some bloggers raised concerns that Microsoft would not release its Linux Integration Components on Sept. 8 as planned, concurrent with the release of its highly anticipated Hyper-V virtualization application.

The components, which include special drivers for networking and storage, are expected to make Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise guests run as well on Hyper-V as Microsoft VMs and give SUSE a performance edge over rivals such as Red Hat Inc. and Ubuntu on Microsoft machines.

But not to worry.

Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc. reported solid revenue growth in its third-quarter earnings call yesterday, with net revenues of $245 million, up from $236 million for the second quarter of 2008 and from $237 million the third quarter of the previous year.

Third-quarter operating profit this year was $1 million, compared to a $10 million operating loss the previous year.

A recent Business Week article said Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. is ripe for a takeover bid because its pockets don’t bulge as quickly as those of proprietary vendors.