company . for other uses see red hat disambiguation . red hat inc. red hat headquarters type public traded as nyse rht s & p 500 component industry computer software founded 1993 ; 23 years ago 1993 1 founder bob young marc ewing headquarters raleigh north carolina u.s. area served worldwide key people hugh shelton chairman jim whitehurst ceo products red hat enterprise linux red hat mobile application platform red hat directory server fedora red hat certificate system red hat enterprise linux openstack platform red hat satellite jboss enterprise middleware red hat enterprise virtualization red hat storage server red hat cloudforms 2 red hat openshift revenue us 1.534 billion 2014 3 operating income us 232.29 million 2014 3 net income us 178.29 million 2014 3 total assets us 3.107 billion 2014 3 total equity us 1.551 billion 2014 3 number of employees 9 300 may 2016 4 subsidiaries red hat india website www.redhat.com red hat inc. is an american multinational software company providing open source software products to the enterprise community . founded in 1993 red hat has its corporate headquarters in raleigh north carolina with satellite offices worldwide . 5 red hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system red hat enterprise linux and with the acquisition of open source enterprise middleware vendor jboss . red hat also offers red hat enterprise virtualization rhev an enterprise virtualization product . red hat provides storage operating system platforms middleware applications management products and support training and consulting services . red hat creates maintains and contributes to many free software projects . it has acquired several proprietary software product codebases through corporate mergers and acquisitions and has released such software under open source licenses . as of march 2016 update red hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the linux kernel version 4.5 after intel . 6 contents 1 history 2 fedora project 3 business model 4 programs and projects 4.1 one laptop per child 4.2 dogtail 4.3 mrg 4.4 opensource.com 4.5 red hat exchange 4.6 red hat subscription manager 4.7 openshift 4.8 openstack 4.9 cloudforms 4.10 other projects 5 utilities and tools 6 subsidiaries 6.1 red hat india 7 mergers and acquisitions 7.1 acquisitions 7.2 divestitures 8 references 9 external links history edit in 1993 bob young incorporated the acc corporation a catalog business that sold linux and unix software accessories . in 1994 marc ewing created his own linux distribution which he named red hat linux 7 ewing had worn a red cornell university lacrosse hat given to him by his grandfather while attending carnegie mellon university 8 9 10 . ewing released the software in october and it became known as the halloween release . young bought ewing s business in 1995 clarification needed and the two merged to become red hat software with young serving as chief executive officer ceo . red hat went public on august 11 1999 achieving the eighth biggest first day gain in the history of wall street . 7 matthew szulik succeeded bob young as ceo in december of that year . 11 bob young went on to found the online print on demand and self publishing company lulu in 2002 . before its ipo red hat had received some funding from joyce young the aunt of founder bob young . when red hat went public she cashed in enough stock to recoup her initial investment then left the remaining stock to linger for fun . her return on investment was so great that by january 2000 she was a millionaire allowing her to donate us 29 million to the hamilton community foundation in june 2000 . 12 on november 15 1999 red hat acquired cygnus solutions . cygnus provided commercial support for free software and housed maintainers of gnu software products such as the gnu debugger and gnu binutils . one of the founders of cygnus michael tiemann became the chief technical officer of red hat and by 2008 update the vice president of open source affairs . later red hat acquired wirespeed c2net and hell s kitchen systems . 13 in february 2000 infoworld awarded red hat its fourth consecutive operating system product of the year award for red hat linux 6.1 . 14 red hat acquired planning technologies inc in 2001 and aol s iplanet directory and certificate server software in 2004 . red hat moved its headquarters from durham to north carolina state university s centennial campus in raleigh north carolina in february 2002 . in the following month red hat introduced red hat linux advanced server 15 16 later renamed red hat enterprise linux rhel . dell 17 ibm 18 hp 19 and oracle corporation 20 announced their support of the platform . 21 in december 2005 cio insight magazine conducted its annual vendor value survey in which red hat ranked 1 in value for the second year in a row . 22 red hat stock became part of the nasdaq 100 on december 19 2005 . red hat acquired open source middleware provider jboss on june 5 2006 and jboss became a division of red hat . on september 18 2006 red hat released the red hat application stack which integrated the jboss technology and which was certified by other well known software vendors . 23 24 on december 12 2006 red hat stock moved from trading on nasdaq rhat to the new york stock exchange rht . in 2007 red hat acquired metamatrix and made an agreement with exadel to distribute its software . on march 15 2007 red hat released red hat enterprise linux 5 and in june acquired mobicents . on march 13 2008 red hat acquired amentra a provider of systems integration services for service oriented architecture business process management systems development and enterprise data services . on july 27 2009 red hat replaced cit group in standard and poor s 500 stock index a diversified index of 500 leading companies of the u.s. economy . 25 26 this was reported as a major milestone for linux . 27 28 on december 15 2009 it was reported that red hat will pay us 8.8 million to settle a class action lawsuit related to the restatement of financial results from july 2004 . the suit had been pending in u.s. district court for the eastern district of north carolina . red hat reached the proposed settlement agreement and recorded a one time charge of us 8.8 million for the quarter that ended nov. 30 . 29 on january 10 2011 red hat announced that it would expand its headquarters in two phases adding 540 employees to the raleigh operation and investing over us 109 million . the state of north carolina is offering up to us 15 million in incentives . the second phase involves expansion into new technologies such as software visualization and technology cloud offerings . 30 on august 25 2011 red hat announced it would move about 600 employees from the n.c. state centennial campus to two progress plaza downtown . 31 a ribbon cutting ceremony was held june 24 2013 in the re branded red hat headquarters . 32 in 2012 red hat became the first one billion dollar open source company reaching us 1.13 billion in annual revenue during its fiscal year . 33 on october 16 2015 red hat announced its acquisition of it automation startup ansible rumoured for an estimated us 100 million . 34 fedora project edit fedora project logo main article fedora project red hat sponsors the fedora project a community supported open source project that aims to promote the rapid progress of free and open source software and content . fedora aims for rapid innovation using open processes and public forums . 35 the fedora project board which comprises community leaders and representatives of red hat leads the project and steers the direction of the project and of fedora the linux distribution it develops . red hat employees work with the code alongside community members and many innovations within the fedora project make their way into new releases of red hat enterprise linux . business model edit red hat operates on a professional open source business model based on open code development within a community professional quality assurance and subscription based customer support . they produce open source code so that more programmers can make further adaptations and improvements . red hat sells subscriptions for the support training and integration services that help customers in using their open source software products . customers pay one set price for unlimited access to services such as red hat network and up to 24 7 support . 36 in september 2014 however ceo jim whitehurst announced that red hat was in the midst of a major shift from client server to cloud mobile ... t he prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era and to position red hat as the provider of choice for enterprises entire cloud infrastructure . 37 programs and projects edit one laptop per child edit red hat engineers worked with the one laptop per child initiative a non profit organization established by members of the mit media lab to design and produce an inexpensive laptop and provide every child in the world with access to open communication open knowledge and open learning . the xo 4 laptop the latest update machine of this project runs a slimmed down version of fedora 17 as its operating system . dogtail edit dogtail an open source automated graphical user interface gui test framework initially developed by red hat consists of free software released under the gnu general public license gpl and is written in python . it allows developers to build and test their applications . red hat announced the release of dogtail at the 2006 red hat summit . 38 39 mrg edit red hat mrg is a clustering infrastructure platform intended for integrated high performance computing hpc . the acronym mrg stands for messaging realtime grid . red hat enterprise mrg replaces the red hat enterprise linux rhel a linux distribution developed by red hat kernel in order to provide extra support for real time computing together with middleware support for message brokerage and scheduling workload to local or remote virtual machines grid and cloud infrastructures . 40 as of 2011 update red hat works with the condor high throughput computing system community and also provides support for the software . 41 the tuna performance monitoring tool runs in the mrg environment . 42 aims the platform strives to incorporate all the above aspects of hpc into one it infrastructure for better performance reliability and interoperability . it claims to simplify and automate a range of it tasks of deployment operation managing and monitoring of clustered and distributed infrastructure and applications . opensource.com edit red hat produces the online publication opensource.com . the site highlights ways open source principles apply in domains other than software development . the site tracks the application of open source philosophy to business education government law health and life . the company originally produced a newsletter called under the brim . wide open magazine first appeared in march 2004 as a means for red hat to share technical content with subscribers on a regular basis . the under the brim newsletter and wide open magazine merged in november 2004 to become red hat magazine . in january 2010 red hat magazine became opensource.com . 43 red hat exchange edit in 2007 red hat announced that it had reached an agreement with some free software and open source foss companies that allowed it to make a distribution portal called red hat exchange reselling foss software with the original branding intact . 44 45 however by 2010 red hat had abandoned the exchange program to focus their efforts more on their open source channel alliance which began in april 2009 . 46 red hat subscription manager