Red Hat: From Manic Acquisitions to Focused Execution

Article Source The Open Road
July 9, 2009, 8:02 am

Red Hat is at the top of its game right now, delivering quarter after quarter of impressive performance despite (or, perhaps, because of) a global recession. But it wasn't always thus. Despite a meteoric initial public offering in 1999, Red Hat spent years fumbling about for a winning game plan, dabbling in technologies that took it far beyond its core competence in operating systems.

Small wonder, then, that Red Hat today hasn't risen to the bait to move beyond its core competence.

In fact, it may well have been the burden of its IPO that set Red Hat scurrying to marry open-source ideology with hard-headed business acumen, a thought prompted by Red Hat's bizarre history of acquisitions. This history suggests that much of Red Hat's laser-like focus on core infrastructure today may stem from its wild forays into just about everything else in the past...

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