Expanding Linux adoption beyond key vertical markets is an important driver for Red Hat's growth, which remains steady even as one of its strongest customer sectors, financial services, is getting hit hard by the U.S. crisis, the company's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said Tuesday.

At a Red Hat analyst event in New York, which was available via webcast, Whitehurst said that while Red Hat does well with "companies that use technology for competitive advantage," mainstream companies that don't care about being on the leading edge of technology adoption are still largely an untapped market for the vendor.

Red Hat has a high market share among companies that focus on technology to drive their businesses, such as financial services companies and major movie studios, he said.

However, this is just a small part of the enterprise IT market, and Red Hat needs to "make sure that we are delivering the commercial capabilities required for the expansion into the mainstream," Whitehurst said.

These capabilities include continuing to partner with independent software vendors and major systems integrators, such as Accenture and EDS, to help Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compete more effectively against Microsoft Windows.

Whitehurst said that while the entire market opportunity for IT infrastructure, which is where Red Hat plays, is worth about US$200 billion according to IDC, Red Hat is still a "small-share player" in about $50 billion of that market.

One of the sectors that was early to adopt Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was the financial services sector, which is currently being pummeled by a massive economic crisis in the U.S. However, Red Hat hasn't yet felt serious ramifications from that, something Whitehurst attributed to the subscription-based, open-source business model the company employs.

"What we do is clearly an economically superior development model, making that consumable to the enterprise," he said. "It's something we’ve done for years and something that someone else hasn't been able to duplicate."

Having a subscription model also means that Red Hat already has revenue on the books going into a new fiscal year, so it can forecast accordingly and realistically for growth, Whitehurst said.

Tuesday marked the first time Whitehurst spoke to Red Hat analysts en masse, as he only took over for longtime Red Hat leader Matt Szulik last December when Szulik left the company for health reasons. Whitehurst came to Red Hat from Delta Airlines, where he was chief operating officer.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.