Red Hat celebrates its 10-year IPO anniversary
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 12 August 2009, 23:01 IST
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Bangalore: On August 11, 1999, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) launched its Initial Public offering (IPO) and the company saw its shares triple. Over the past 10 years, Red Hat has maintained its investment in strong branding and have been investing more than $100 million each year to improve Linux and its distribution network. Ian Gray, who was then a Sun employee and is now Red Hat's Vice President of Global Support said to CNET, "I remember sitting in the Sun office in UK watching the stock skyrocket, thinking the world had gone mad." Back in 1999, Red Hat had filed S-1 document with the Securities and Exchange Commission registering its intent to sell its shares on the public market. This step was taken with desire to use the IPO cash to improve Red Hat's brand, expand professional services and to improve its Web site to create the definitive online destination for the open source community. Even back in 1999, the company recognized in its S-1 filing that "If faster Internet connections become widely available, more users may download the distribution from the net, and fewer will buy it." Red Hat's concern turned out to be true and this led into the introduction of Red Hat Network in 2000 and Advanced server (later became Red Hat Enterprise Linux) in 2002. Red Hat was able to take advantage of hype created around its IPO ten years back and so far has made a massive impact on the software and Open Source sector.