Red Hat is the world’s largest enterprise open-source software company, best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the dominant commercial Linux distribution in enterprise environments. IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion, making it one of the biggest software deals in history.
Beyond RHEL, Red Hat’s product portfolio includes OpenShift (a Kubernetes platform), Ansible (IT automation), OpenStack (private cloud), and middleware solutions. OpenShift has become one of the most widely deployed enterprise Kubernetes platforms, used by thousands of organizations to manage containerized applications.
Red Hat’s business model is built on subscriptions rather than license fees. The company contributes heavily to upstream open-source projects and then packages, hardens, and supports those technologies for enterprise use. This approach has made Red Hat the bridge between open-source communities and large corporate IT departments.
The company employs thousands of engineers worldwide who contribute to Linux kernel development, Kubernetes, and dozens of other open-source projects. Red Hat Summit and Red Hat Forum events draw tens of thousands of attendees annually.
