Profitable Red Hat targets databases

Linux seller Red Hat said it will "aggressively" launch new database software next Monday, following revelations that it had edged into the black for the first time.

After celebrating a first operating profit of $600,000, chief executive Matthew Szulik said of the software, which is expected to be called Red Hat Database: "We'll have a pretty aggressive rollout next week. This has been an area we've been studying for a number of months now. It'll obviously be a completely open source stack."

Despite the small profit the firm's revenues grew slower than expected to $25.6m, after figures had been adjusted to remove one-off costs, compared to the $29.6m analysts had predicted.

International revenues accounted for 29 per cent of the total, and the firm said it had seen no sign of a slowdown in Europe.

Red Hat has been expanding from operating systems into higher-level software such as an ecommerce offering and a version of the Apache web server. The database product would fit into Red Hat's plan to sell subscriptions to its software management services, said Szulik.

Analysts maintain that Red Hat would not make inroads into the enterprise database market but could enjoy success in the small to medium sized enterprise market. The firm controls just over half of the distributed market for Linux.

However, analysts were also surprised that the company would not issue revenue guidance for the rest of the year.

"Given the change in our own selling model to really be enterprise-focused and due to, especially in the embedded systems market, the delay of projects we've been seeing, we're not comfortable with forecasting our revenues for the rest of the year," said Szulik.

Red Hat has $72.5m in cash to see it through the current economic slowdown.