Red Hat changed its mind and announced that due to the dominance of only one vendor on the desktop market, producing Linux desktops wouldn’t be a practical alternative. Gartner analysts found that Linux commands as little as 1.2% of the U.S. market. Despite that, the company announced that it will continue to develop its Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktops, as this still remains a practical alternative for companies.

In a statement issued by Red Hat, it motivated its choice as follows: “as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops is much harder to do than with servers […] Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.”

However, Red Hat unveiled among its 2008-2009 goals the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHDG), which was originally announced at the 2007 Summit Conference but has been delayed for almost a year due to business issues. RHDG is designed for low cost PCs and targets emerging markets (especially the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China). “As mentioned earlier, the desktop business model is tough, so we want to be prepared before delivering a product to the emerging markets.”

“Looking to the future, Red Hat customers and partners appreciate that the world is moving to thin/virtualized/appliance-based clients so we are working with them to deliver open source technologies that make these systems possible,” the company.

Last month, Red Hat announced the acquisition of Amentra, a provider of systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems development and enterprise data solutions. Amentra has over 140 employees in locations including Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Charlotte, Tampa and Richmond.