February 5, 2008 4:25 PM PST
Forbes names Red Hat America's 11th fastest-growing company
I wouldn't mind being in a list with companies like Google and Salesforce.com, which is precisely the company Red Hat is keeping in its continued growth trajectory. Forbes just named Red Hat the 11th fastest-growing company in the United States. Red Hat's sales have grown 41 percent over the past five years.
Not too shabby.
It's particularly impressive when you consider the hurdles a company has to overcome just to be considered for the list:
Our focus is on sales growth--we require at least 10% annualized sales gains over the past five years--but candidates for our list must be profitable over the past 12 months and have Thomson IBES consensus earnings forecasts of at least 10% annualized earnings growth over the next three to five years.
To which Red Hat adds further detail:
From an investor's perspective (where future results are key), the list also seems to include those companies that the equity analyst community believes are positioned to deliver double-digit earnings growth well into the future. Given our fast, top-line growth, strong EBITDA margins and high cash flow yield, Red Hat is a standout company on Forbes' survey of over 2,000 public companies.
All while contributing millions of lines of code to the software community...for free. Hmm. Maybe there's something in this open-source phenomenon, after all.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
