Red Hat's revenues are a little short of 3 billion (though growing fast), and the market cap is about 15-20 (going by memory). That is with a full software stack going from IaaS to containers to application server. Right now containers are the thing, but what if they are going to become commodity in 5 years? And can the Docker brand compete against the Google and Red Hat brands that are also selling container management platforms (fully open source in the case of RH, no enterprise features and no lock-in)? It seems like a very generous valuation.

Disclaimer: working at RH

Think about what redhat was 10 years ago. They were basically a company that burned a Linux distro on a CD and shipped it to CompUSA that sold it for $50. You how exactly everything will unfold but just like we knew linux was the future, I thinks it's becoming obvious that containers are the future as well.

No, that was Red Hat during the dotcom boom. 10 years ago, they had already acquired JBoss, and RHEL was at its fourth major release (RHEL5; the first was 2.1 :-) in 2002, after which they stopped selling boxed sets). 10 years ago Red Hat was already highly profitable and had been growing for years. But as you point out that only happened after a complete overhaul of the governance and business model.

In that respect, Docker is much more traditional than SuSE or Red Hat, and indeed it would be much harder for anyone else to replicate RH's "miracle" nowadays. [1] And that's exactly because RH is already there and applying its business knowledge to Docker's field.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...

> Redhat is valued at ~1.3B USD.

Redhat's market cap is $17 billion, so I'm not sure where you're getting that figure from. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHT

I guess I was looking st their total equity. But I guess you're correct and market cap would be a better number to look at.