Red Hat had a busy week. The company released a brand new product, JBoss Data Grid 6 and new versions of its enterprise application platform and enterprise Linux distribution. However, this week wasn’t all about the code, the company also revealed its 2013 first quarter financial results.

Red Hat had met or exceeded investor expectations four straight quarters. The company’s recent performance coupled with Red Hat’s deeper relationship with IBM, an aggressive stock repurchase program and the hire of Arun Oberoi as Executive Vice President, Global Sales and Services in May, created high expectations going into the Q1 2013 earnings report. Red Hat managed to surpass revenue and profit targets, reporting total revenues of $314.7m, an 18.88 percent increase over the same period last year, and total gross profits of $268.7m, a 20.88 percent period over period increase.

Channel partners were a big help to Red Hat, accounting for 64 percent of total sales. About 55 percent of bookings came from the Americas region, 25 percent came from EMEA, and 20 percent came from Asia/Pacific. Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst also noted  that 25 of the company’s top 30 deals exceeded $1m – a record for Red Hat. He added, that all of the top 25 renewal deals for Q1 all renewed at an average of 120 percent of their original value. Most renewing customers also purchased additional licenses and products.

Unfortunately for Red Hat, subscription billings grew 16.5 percent to $310m during the quarter. Subscription growth wasn’t bad, but it was substantially less than the 28 percent increase for Q1 2012 and the $319m Wall Street had predicted. Red Hat’s second-quarter forecast also disappointed. The company forecasted earnings of 28 cents to 29 cents a share on between $320m to $322m in revenue, which fell short of analysts’ Q2 estimates of 29 cents per share on $331 million. The news caused Red Hat’s stock price to decline 6.19 percent to $53.00 per share.