The very same analyst who sent Red Hat stock crashing after the Oracle announcement has reversed her stance on the company, it would seem.

Egbert now expects a strong finish to Red Hat's year with next month's launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 fuelling a cycle of customer upgrades.

She is raising her target price for Red Hat's stock a whoppping 43 per cent to $30.

Which is interesting, because it was Egbert who downgraded Red Hat's price nearly 13 per cent last October to $21 when she midread signs of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) as evidence the database giant was preparing its own open source stack.

Further along in the article is an analysis of Microvell and the non-event that they have also been in Red Hat's financial outlook, including an insightful look into the timing of some of the big coupon announcements and why "more than 35,000 coupons distributed to date" is unimpressive to analysts:

As for that Novell/Microsoft deal expanding the Linux market... we've had four major customers announced in quick succession during December and January, totaling more than 16,000 SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) certificates.

The timing is a little too quick given the deal was only announced in November, and that the PR approval machine on customer announcements is as slow as molasses in winter. It suggests these well-publicized wins owe more to Microsoft milking relationships with existing customers than to any genuine market expansion using SuSE and a relatively tiny number of server sales.

So, who's the winner here so far?