RALEIGH – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) on Monday reported earnings but its revenue fell just a bit short of Wall Street expectations in its fiscal third quarter that was dominated by the news it had struck a $34 billion deal to be acquired by IBM.

In view of that deal, which is still pending, Red Hat executives did not sit for a conference call with analysts as is the norm. The Raleigh-based open source software and cloud services firm also did not discuss financial guidance.

“Adoption of Red Hat’s technologies that enable customers to build and deploy applications more securely and consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments continued to drive our growth in Q3,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, in a statement.

Red Hat schedules stockholder meeting to vote on $34B IBM deal

“For instance, our Certified Cloud and Service Providers (CCSP) program reached the $300 million annualized run-rate milestone in Q3 with 25% year-over-year growth of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-demand in the public clouds. In addition, we continue to experience strong customer growth in Red Hat OpenShift, our enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Red Hat Ansible Automation, both of which added more than 100 customers in Q3.”

The firm said it had profit of 51 cents per share. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, came to 96 cents per share. of $94.5 million.

The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of 14 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 87 cents per share.

The open-source software company posted revenue of $846.8 million in the period, missing Street forecasts. Twelve analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $853.6 million.

Big Blue opens its arms, wallet, to Red Hat, but did deal cost too much at $34B?

“In Q3, we closed 100 deals over $1 million and delivered double digit total revenue growth of 13% year-over-year, or 15% in constant currency and deferred revenue growth of 20% year-over-year, or 23% in constant currency despite continued foreign exchange volatility. Moreover, our total backlog grew 22% year-over-year to approximately $3.5 billion,” explained Eric Shander, Red Hat’s chief financial officer.

“Strong renewals of our largest deals also helped drive these results with all of our top 25 deals renewing at an upsell rate above 120%.”

Red Hat shares have climbed 47 percent since the beginning of the year, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has fallen almost 5 percent. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $176, an increase of 37 percent in the last 12 months.

The company noted that:

  • “Third quarter total revenue of $847 million, up 13% year-over-year, or 15% in constant currency
  • “Third quarter Infrastructure-related subscription revenue of $534 million, up 8% year-over-year, or 9% in constant currency
  • “Third quarter Application Development-related and other emerging technology subscription revenue of $207 million, up 28% year-over-year, or 30% in constant currency
  • “Quarter-end deferred revenue balance of $2.5 billion, up 20% year-over-year, or 23% in constant currency”

Read the full earnings breakdown online.