Depending on how you look at these things, Red Hat has long been a billion dollar company. With a market cap of almost $10-billion dollars, Red Hat, the biggest of Linux companies, has long been open-source’s shiniest success story. The gold standard of business success, though, is making a billion dollars in revenue in a single fiscal year and Red Hat has just pulled this feat off.

Red Hat didn’t just creak the billion dollar mark though. It smashed its way through it. For the full fiscal year 2012, total revenue was $1.13 billion, an increase of 25% over the prior year. Subscription revenue from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was $965.6 million, up 25% year-over-year.

In the earnings call, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s President and CEO said. “Red Hat is the first pure-play, open source company, and one of only a select few software companies, to have achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone. The open-source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centers for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement.”

Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived. More >