Linux distributor Red Hat made a $15.5m GAAP profit in the last quarter, well down on the profit of $24.6m it made for the same period last year.

Revenues were up though, and slightly outpaced market expectations, climbing 45 per cent on the firm's fiscal Q3 2006 to $105.8m. Red Hat said it added 12,000 net new customers in the three months to 30 November.

Red Hat's finance chief Charlie Peters described the performance as "solid", and the firm said integration of April's middleware purchase JBoss is going swimmingly. At its last earnings call, analysts begged to differ.

The firm's share price is yet to recover from the pasting it took this year thanks to Larry Ellison's decision to steamroller Oracle onto its maintainance territory, but enjoyed a 13 per cent spike on the results in after hours trading yesterday. ®

Related stories

• Red Hat beats Q2 expectations with Linux sales (26 September 2007)
• Red Hat spreads its JBoss in Q1 (27 June 2007)
• Analysis Red Hat to pack punch on Oracle clustering? (15 March 2007)
• Red Hat frees Exadel (5 March 2007)
• Comment Analyst reverses stance on Red Hat threat (14 February 2007)
• MySQL bites Oracle before Oracle bites it (30 January 2007)
• Oracle turns the screws in Red Hat switcheroo (23 January 2007)
• Sun squares up to Oracle with Red Hat challenge (17 January 2007)
• Oracle must eat Red Hat or fork, says Ubuntu man (10 November 2006)
• Red Hat and VMware make a bundle (9 November 2006)
• Red Hat promises to keep charging customers double (27 October 2006)
• OpenWorld Ellison muscles in on Red Hat support biz (25 October 2006)
• Red Hat makes Xen GUI in Fedora Core 6 (24 October 2006)
• Red Hat grapples with Wall St over JBoss (27 September 2006)
• Red Hat wraps up JBoss combo to go (18 September 2006)
• In brief Red Hat takes Xen baby step (15 September 2006)