Success can be defined in countless ways, but it's hard to argue with bottom-line results. In 2012, Red Hat became the first open source company to surpass US$1 billion in revenue. "Red Hat is the first pure-play, open source company, and one of only a select few software companies, to have achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone," said president and CEO Jim Whitehurst in the announcement. "The open source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centers for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement."