Red Hat prepares for growth while key competitor teeters on brink of collapse

While enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat is preparing for strong growth in 2012, the situation is far less rosy at competitor Mandriva.

In recent days Red Hat has announced a new enterprise storage appliance platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. The company also anticipates that the growth in cloud computing, particularly as a back-end to consumer appliances, will mean the deployment of more Linux servers by business.

In order to support the anticipated growth, Red Hat has also announced that it intends to hire 1,000 employees during 2012, boosting its workforce by a quarter, and open a new global headquarters in Raleigh, NC.

However Red Hat’s good fortune has not shared with competitor Mandriva, where CEO Dominique Loucougain has sent a letter warning that the company could close its doors as soon as January 16 unless key shareholders allow it to raise more capital.

Mandriva, originally known as Mandrake, was a pioneering Linux vendor during the mid 1990s, but has been increasingly squeezed out of the market by competitors such as Red Hat in the enterprise Linux server market and Ubuntu in the low-end desktop Linux market.