LATEST INTELLIGENCE
THE ECONOMIC
IMPACT OF RED
HAT ENTERPRISE
LINUX: TRILLIONS,
YES TRILLIONS, OF
DOLLARS
SPONSORED BY: RED HAT
PRESENTED BY
I
IN THIS WHITE PAPER
This White Paper sizes the economic impact of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in three dimensions:
the revenue and expenses that are “touched” in
the enterprises that use RHEL and the economic
advantage accrued, the impact of IT expenses on
technology and staff labor by enterprises using RHEL,
and the size and reach of the ecosystem whose
products and services sit on RHEL.
This document is based on IDC research and forecasts
on IT markets, internal IT models on the economic
impact of IT, third-party economic data, and a global
survey of 600+ line-of-business and IT executives.
Download whitepaper here
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
• The software and applications running on RHEL
will “touch” US$10 trillion of business revenue this
year and grow at twice the rate of the economy.
Business revenue will top US$188 trillion.
• The use of RHEL in support of these business
activities will provide economic benefits of more
than US$1 trillion a year to customers.
• The use of RHEL by IT organizations will save
those organizations nearly US$7 billion this year.
18
INTELLIGENTCIO
• The RHEL ecosystem will make more than US$82
billion this year and will grow to US$119 billion in
2023 with a CAGR of 11.5%. For every dollar of
revenue made by Red Hat in 2019, the ecosystem
will make US$21.74.
• With the ecosystem growing 11% a year from
2019 to 2023, net-new ecosystem revenue (from
2018) will add up to more than US$150 billion.
• This year, Red Hat and its ecosystem will employ
nearly 900,000 workers, and among customers,
the IT professionals who work with the software,
hardware, and services stacked on RHEL will
number more than 1.7 million.
• While some firms in the ecosystem are
multinationals, most are not. As a result, the
ecosystem will invest nearly US$48 billion locally
in 2019.
PUTTING A TRILLION DOLLARS IN CONTEXT
How could the footprint of a software operating
system, basically built on free software, “touch”
anything like a trillion dollars? The answer starts
with the size of the global economy, where GDP is
expected to exceed US$86 trillion in 2019.1 But while
GDP is a measure of output, it is not a measure of
business revenue.
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