Twenty-five years ago, Red Hat was incorporated out of a sewing room in Connecticut and a bachelor pad in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our mission was to offer a stable, easy-to-use distribution of a constantly evolving, community-developed operating system called Linux.

Fast forward to 2018, as we stand ready to host the largest Red Hat Summit to date, and you’ll find Red Hat has continued that mission with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, making it the Linux operating system leader and the fastest growing operating system vendor (of the report’s named vendors) compared to Windows, other Linux distributions, UNIX, Mainframe and even client-focused operating system providers according to the latest IDC report (Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems Market Shares, 2017; release May 2018).   

Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems CAGR by Vendor, 2012-2017

In a report that includes operating system versions including client, server, and embedded across consumer and commercial markets, Red Hat commands the second largest share with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a server operating system that powers the on-premise, virtual, containerized, and cloud applications for enterprises across the Fortune 500.

Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems 2017 Share Snapshot

According to IDC, the growth accelerators in operating systems overall is robust cloud adoption and continued cloud buildout, infrastructure updates and platform modernization, IoT and embedded operating systems, and the advantages coming out of non-x86 architectures. According to IDC, Red Hat “remains a leading innovator of new Linux operating system technologies, as well as complementary technologies such as middleware, virtualization, and PaaS.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a modern operating platform designed to provide customers with:

  • A consistent foundation across hybrid IT environments, including the first choice commercial Linux distribution in the public cloud;

  • Control with built-in security and support from a leading product security team;

  • Confidence to run business-critical workloads with 10+ years support and a focus on application stability;

  • Freedom to innovate with access to container technologies, development tools and thousands of cloud, hardware and software partners.

  • Full support for complete infrastructure initiatives from virtualization to emerging technology areas like OpenStack and cloud-native deployments purpose-built and optimized for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.