earnings

Red Hat continues to impress. Coming off its already-strong first quarter and higher guidance for its fiscal year, Red Hat announced on Wednesday 29 percent year-over-year growth for its fiscal second quarter and 5 percent growth over its first quarter.

Total revenue for its second quarter hit $164.4 million. Both revenue and profit came in above analyst expectations.

This was the first time in years that Red Hat's second-quarter billings exceeded its first quarter billings. Not bad for a company that gives away free software.

Importantly, Red Hat appears to be doing longer-term deals, as its total deferred revenue balance was $496.9 million, growing 32 percent year-over-year and 1 percent sequentially. This would suggest that Red Hat customers are increasingly comfortable making a long-term bet on Red Hat's future. Indeed, on the analyst call, Red Hat Chief Financial Officer Charlie Peters indicated that the average booking for Red Hat is 24 months and that 36 percent of its subscriptions are for a term greater than one year.

In selling longer-term deals, Red Hat is successfully blocking competitive pressure from Novell, Microsoft, and other companies that might want to cut into its accounts.

On the earnings call, Peters and CEO Jim Whitehurst identified several key trends:… Read more

Microsoft on Monday announced a new stock buyback program of up to $40 billion, sending its stock up more than 5 percent in premarket trading.

The software giant said it would repurchase up to $40 billion worth of its shares through September 2013. It recently completed a previous $40 billion buyback program.

Investors, who tend to cheer stock buyback programs because it makes existing shares in the market more valuable, pushed Microsoft's stock to $26.50 a share in premarket trading, up 5.33 percent.

Microsoft has seen its shares lose roughly 22 percent of their value since it … Read more

Oracle reported improved quarterly earnings Thursday, in part fueled by sales of its Fusion middleware.

Investors applauded Oracle's first-quarter performance, sending its stock up in after-hours trading to $19.20 a share. During regular trading, Oracle closed at $18.75 a share--up nearly 3.6 percent for the day.

Oracle posted net income of nearly $1.1 billion, or 21 cents a share, for the period ending August 31, up 28 percent from the same period a year ago. Excluding charges, Oracle posted earnings of 29 cents a share, beating Wall Street's estimates by 2 cents a share, … Read more

IBM's third-quarter revenues coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are tracking on a similar growth pattern as the first half of the year, the company announced on Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Big Blue, which is meeting with European investors, said revenue growth during the first two months of the third quarter is "consistent" with the company's EMEA performance during the first six months of the year.

For IBM, that could bode well for its third quarter, given that the EMEA region accounts for roughly a third of its overall … Read more

Novell beat Wall Street's estimates with a solid third quarter, but the real story is in its continued Linux growth. Net revenue rose to $245 million from $237 million in 2007, but Novell's third-quarter loss quadrupled to $15.1 million from $3.7 million in 2007. The company reported its annual adjusted operating margin to be between 8 percent and 10 percent, up from an earlier expected 7 percent to 9 percent.

So, things are looking up.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Novell's Linux revenue, which soared 30 percent, year over year, to $31 million for … Read more

This post was updated at 3:50 p.m. PDT with comments from Michael Dell and analysts.

Dell on Thursday reported its second-quarter results, and the company admitted it had more work to do to improve its performance.

Its second quarter profits were down 17 percent to $616 million, from $746 million a year ago. Dell reported earnings of 31 cents per share, missing analysts' expected 36 cents per share.

Revenue was $16.43 billion for the quarter, an 11-percent increase from a year ago. That was helped by a big boost in shipments of the company's hardware--up 19 … Read more

TiVo's midyear report card is in, and the numbers are better than most analysts expected.

The results aren't fabulous, but anything's better than the $17.7 million loss a year ago. In the second quarter of this year, the maker of digital video recorders earned revenues of $65.2 million, eking out a profit of $2.9 million, good for 3 cents per share for investors. Analysts had been anticipating revenues between $54 million and 59.3 million, a loss of 2 cents per share.

TiVo recorded lower services revenues this quarter than a year ago, but … Read more

After 10 straight quarters of grabbing a favorable foreign-exchange rate, Google's luck is expected to hit a bump in the third quarter, according to a report Monday by a Wall Street analyst.

The search giant, which relies on more than half of its gross revenues coming from overseas operations, is expected to take a sequential $22 million hit to its third-quarter gross revenue, due to unfavorable exchange rates, according to a report by Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal.

As a result, Google's anticipated international gross revenue is expected to come in at $3.03 billion for the third … Read more

Shares of software-as-a-service company Salesforce.com fell Thursday in morning trading after the company announced cautious guidance for the upcoming third quarter.

Shares were trading at $55.80 by midday, down from Wednesday's close of $65.30.

Looking ahead, the company said it expects revenue in the third quarter to be between $273 million and $274 million, slightly below analysts' expectations.

Thursday, Piper Jaffray downgraded the stock from "buy" to "neutral."

The stock slip came despite a strong second quarter. Salesforce announced revenue of $263.1 million for the second quarter ended July 31, up … Read more