Let me start off on the Linux side and then let Jim talk a little bit about his thoughts. Clearly the very key differentiator for us with Linux is the certified ecosystem, there is no other vendor out there today that has a certified ecosystem we have with 3,000 certified apps, more than 4,200 business certified hardware. Even those distributions that claim to be clones of Red Hat do not have the certifications and therefore if you’re running an enterprise you can’t take the risk of something not being supported. So that’s certainly one thing. Very compelling value proposition is the second thing and that just applies across everything we do. We have found a way to offer software and support at prices that bring a great deal of value to the customers and do it in the way that we’ve been able to scale by growing a partner, a distribution partner ecosystem as well as this partner that certify our software, apps and the hardware.
Jim Whitehurst
Just to add to that, I am not an expert in other open source business models at some of our competitors or some of the other open source companies use, right. We have a very disciplined business model that’s focused on commoditizing important layers in the stack that commoditize an improving performance. So we’re not trying to differentiate in the application space functionality versus proprietary competitors. So as Charlie said that allows us to build large ecosystems of other commercial providers either hardware or software that want to work with us or above or below us at points in the stack. And we’ve been laser like focused on that mission of commoditizing these key layers and working with other partners. I think open source is particularly good at that. I certainly hope for and we certainly like to work with other open source companies out there. But those are fundamentally different business models than what we’re doing.
Trip Chowdhry – Global Equities Research
Okay and the follow up question that I have is regarding cloud computing and the two I would say camps that are evolving as we speak, one is a scale up model where we have virtualization as a key driver for providing cloud services and the other is what I call as a scale out model, also application clouds, in which companies like Google, App Engine, Microsoft and Azure are playing a role. It seems like Red Hat is gravitating towards the first camp and I was a little concerned that probably you may be missing an opportunity in application clouds where at least I know two projects, open source projects, which are having a lot of traction. One is Drizzle which is a spin-off from MySQL and the other one is Eucalyptus and of course Hadoop. So I was wondering who do you see the space and how do you make sure you don’t get blindsided if one takes over the other camp. How are you heading your bets? Thanks again.
Jim Whitehurst
Our strategy again is we are the infrastructure provider to the cloud and regardless of whether that’s cloud providing infrastructure or providing platforms, we expect to be the infrastructure provider there. In our view it’s hard to imagine why anyone would build a cloud on a proprietary stack in this day and age and so we continue to work on adding functionality to our existing products as well as add additional virtualization products which are applicable in the cloud as well. So we feel good about what we’re doing but we can only do so much and do it well with our model.
Tom McCallum
Next question please
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Robert Breza of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Robert Breza – RBC Capital Markets
Hi Charlie, just a quick follow up as you look at the billings, and the trends there towards more one year deals, did that differ by geography and can you also comment, you talked about the trend seen here in Q2, can you also maybe give us some color if there is any color to be given around the geography split amongst those trends. Thanks.
Charlie Peters
First of all I don’t think it was a trend. We had multiple quarters in a row at roughly 24 months. We had one quarter at 19 months. It was partially driven by North America and I expect the second part of your question in terms of what may be happening, currently I’m expecting that North America may start going the other way in Q2. But that remains to be seen. But it was principally North America.
Tom McCallum
Next question please.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Kevin Buttigieg of FTN. Your line is now open.
Kevin Buttigieg – FTN Equity Capital Markets
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