Red Hat boasts strong enterprise sales

Linux distributor Red Hat is claiming strong growth for its enterprise products, as the company prepares to launch the latest version of its operating system.

Reporting its financial fourth-quarter and year-end results, Red Hat recorded an 80 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase in sales of Red Hat Enterprise Linux RHEL technologies.

Subscription and services revenue for the company's enterprise technologies rose from $6.9m to $10.7m (£4.38m to £6.8m).

"Through strong performance of all our enterprise technologies, Red Hat was able to achieve steady, consistent growth in fiscal 2003," said chief financial officer Kevin Thompson.

Red Hat Linux version 9.0, code-named Shrike, will be unveiled on 31 March, which may come as a surprise to those who expected the next release to be version 8.1.

The new software will be released to Red Hat Network subscribers that day, but won't be available on retail until 7 April. It will also be available as a free download.

Version 9.0 will include a new threading system, called the Native Posix Threading Library, designed to handle simultaneous programming tasks.

Better threading improves server tasks such as running Java programs and databases, and helps the performance of some desktop software.

Server customers will also see the adoption of the Apache web server version 2.

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