While the proprietary giants of the enterprise are either struggling to shore up declining revenue streams or trying to shift towards a more open business model, Red Hat Inc. is cruising ahead at a comfortable double-digital growth rate that reached 14 percent in the first quarter. That helped its revenue in the three-month period pass the $481 million mark, which represents a 23 percent increase from last year when adjusting for currency changes.

The jump managed to handily beat the average analyst estimate of $473 million, thanks in no small part to a five million dollar boost from Red Hat’s cloud partner program, which offers paid testing and certification. The rest came from the premium support and other subscription services that the company sells to organizations using its  open-source software, most notably its Linux flavor.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the most popular versions of the free operating system in the traditional data center and has been gaining traction in more modern private clouds as well as on the back of the company’s OpenStack distribution, which comes integrated with the platform out of the box. Much of the rest of its revenue can be attributed to the likewise widely-used JBoss middleware stack.

However, Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service stack hasn’t been doing nearly as well recently amid the increased competition from the similarly open-source Cloud Foundry, which boasts much broader support from the ecosystem. But that didn’t dampen Wall Street’s reaction to the good news.

What stood out in particular for shareholders is the $48 million in net earnings that Red Hat has left over from its first quarter sales, which represents a massive 26 percent increase over its profit in the same period last year. And that growth shows no signs of slowing anytime soon, with the company’s deferred revenue – anticipated future income from subscriptions – having jumped 11 percent to $1.44 billion in conjunction.

Pictured:  Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst via YouTube.