The Red Hat of China

The Linux company is planning on opening up eight new testing centers in China in the next six months in order to capture revenue growth. Open Source and Linux are gaining huge grounds all over the world; it might be at the United States' detriment that its North Carolina-based company is focusing so heavily on the Chinese market.

Red Hat will be expanding its number of employees in China to over 200 within the next year. Looking at the next generation of software developers, Red Hat is partnering with Chinese software schools to train more than 2,000 engineers over the next year and a half. Red Hat expects a growth of 30% in revenue growth before the end of the fiscal year. Red Hat had a total revenue of $400.6 million in fiscal 2007.

Red Hat is switching its resources from Raleigh, North Carolina to mainland China. This may just be another example of the United States' reluctance towards Linux hurting its economy and PC market. Many nations are seeing the benefits of switching to an open source market and utilizing Linux; the open source approach to developing software results in better written code than the closed, proprietary systems that companies such as Microsoft employ.

Many nations are turning away from proprietary software distributors. It's been proven time and time again that proprietary software development stifles progress and innovation. China and other nations are looking at the future, and it's clear that if they want to be the future in software that Linux is more likely that future than closed systems such as Windows. Red Hat Inc is aware of this and like many distributors of Linux, they are looking outside of the United States to promote and sell their software.

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