Market for Linux Support is Huge and Growing.

Red Hat has announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2011, revealing a staggering amount of growth for the company and. by extension, for Linux.

Profits at the Raleigh, Virginia-based company were up from last quarter's $36.8 million to $56.5 million, with revenue up from $264.8 to $281.3 million. Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, said: "We continued to win and strengthen relationships with enterprise customers who partner with Red Hat to reduce costs while modernizing their IT infrastructure to enable applications to run on bare metal, virtualization and in the cloud."

Chief financial officer, Charlie Peters, had a much simpler analysis of the figures: "We're helping customers save money because they use our software to replace much more expensive proprietary software.”

Red Hat has more than quadruples, its value in the past three years. That's about as successful as Apple, but without the number of advertorials from the mainstream media.

The mathematically astute among you will already have realized that Red Hat's revenues for the first half of the year add up to £546.1 million, putting it well on course to achieve its target of making $1 billion in a year from selling free software services.

The company is also growing in terms of brains. Peters said that Red Hat expects to add 600-700 workers, taking its number of employees to about 4.700 worldwide.