Forbes contributor, Dan Woods, posted an interest article titled Will There Ever Be Another Red Hat? While not a wholly interesting article to me (not much new being said I haven’t been following for years), but this question stood out to me:
Will any company ever get to $1 billion or even $500 million in revenue from open source subscriptions and have a chance of being profitable?
I don’t know what the exact financials are from SUSE currently, but from what I can glean, and from what is said during different events I have attended, their business is growing at a double-digit percentage rate which means that they will be nearing the lower of those two numbers at some point in the future (just based on simple math).
And that growth has been happening while the division was spun out of Novell, retooled, and now is in the process of integrating with Micro Focus and being part of a larger strategy for that company.
While I don’t know if SUSE will ever be another Red Hat, maybe that is alright. SUSE is continuing to make contributions to the open source world and making money to employ people to continue to do so. To me, that is a great thing to see.