Red Hat Earnings: Cloud, Storage, Linux Triple Play?

When Red Hat (RHT) Q2 2014 earnings and financial results arrive on Sept. 23, the open source company hopes to show growing momentum beyond Linux. The big question from The VAR Guy: Can Red Hat prove that partners are embracing the company's virtualization, cloud, storage and middleware technologies? Hmmm…

Let's start with the obvious: Red Hat already has strong Linux and JBoss middleware followings. Now for the question marks:

1. RHEV: It's unclear if Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is gaining momentum vs. VMware (VMW) vSphere and Microsoft (MSFT) Hyper-V. No doubt, plenty of customers now run RHEV — which is built on the open source hypervisor called KVM. But The VAR Guy doesn't hear from many channel partners that have mastered RHEV.

2. Red Hat Storage: The latest Red Hat Storage release arrived only a few weeks ago, notes ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. The company is trying to compete in the emerging software-defined storage market. That could mean Red Hat is on a collision course with VMware for the software-defined data center… But it's far too soon to say how Red Hat's overall storage revenues are shaping up.

3. Red Hat Cloud: This is the biggest question mark of all. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is wildly popular as a public and private cloud operating system. But Red Hat concedes many of its cloud offerings — including an OpenStack distribution — may require years to build substantial revenue streams.

So is The VAR Guy worried about Red Hat having its fingers in too many pies and its toes in too few revenue streams? Actually, no. Our resident blogger has been a small but steady Red Hat shareholder for about five years now. 

The VAR Guy remains long on Red Hat. We'll see if that long-term confidence remains in place once the company announces Q2 2014 results on Sept. 23.