We are excited to announce that Red Hat has, once again, been named to Forbes’ Most Innovative Companies List. With our inclusion this year, we have been ranked five times on the prestigious list - in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. This year we ranked 23rd, up two spots from 25th in 2016. A few weeks ago, we also made the Forbes Global 2000 list, recognizing the world’s largest public companies. It’s our first time on that list and, to our knowledge, the first time an open source software company has been recognized on it as well.
We believe this recognition is a testament not just to Red Hat associates around the world, but also to the open source communities that are driving so much incredible innovation. In everything from cloud computing, containers, and automation to IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and more, open source is playing a key role and helping to shape the future.
For nearly 25 years, we have shown that open source is where we believe the best innovation happens. We brought open source to the enterprise mainstream and now put our efforts towards creating the technologies of tomorrow. We’re continually pushing open source to evolve and are proud to collaborate with customers around the world to help them build modern and flexible technology solutions based on open source.
The Most Innovative Companies ranking is based on a company's "innovation premium," which Forbes describes as the difference between market capitalization and the net present value of cash flows from existing businesses (based on a proprietary algorithm from Credit Suisse’s HOLT investment management platform). What makes this methodology particularly rewarding to us, is that it reflects not only our ability to innovate now, but also investors’ “educated hunch” that we have the potential to innovate in the future.