Christopher Tozzi, Contributing Editor

October 29, 2012

2 Min Read
New Canonical Portal Promotes Ubuntu for the Enterprise

Do you make decisions about IT for a business but lack a strong technical background? If so, Canonical wants to talk to you — which is why it has created a new portal, called “Ubuntu Insights,” targeted at promoting Ubuntu in the enterprise. Here’s a look.

As Marketing Manager Sonia Ouarti explained on the Canonical blog, the new resource is “aimed at business people who may not have a technology background, but who are increasingly faced with decisions that involve enterprise computing.” That especially means, I presume, executives at smaller businesses that may not have expansive IT staff, but nonetheless need to make big decisions about IT investments.

To encourage those decision-makers to consider Ubuntu’s cloud, server and desktop solutions for enterprise computing, the Ubuntu Insights portal offers a range of multimedia content. Current examples include:

  • A video introducing OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform that is central to the cloud solutions being developed by Canonical and a host of other vendors in the channel.

  • A blog post arguing that Windows 8 is unfit for the enterprise and urging organizations to migrate to Ubuntu on their workstations.

  • An overview of Landscape, Canonical’s platform for centrally managing large deployments of Ubuntu machines.

  • And perhaps most interestingly — in an era when cloud computing has acquired an abstruse lexicon all its own — a “Cloud Glossary” which defines a number of terms associated with the cloud in general, not just those that relate to Ubuntu.

The portal also hosts an assortment of other blog posts, white papers and similar resources. Canonical clearly has invested a lot of time preparing this tool for helping decision-makers understand what Ubuntu is all about, and how it can potentially work for them.

And that seems like a very smart approach. Arguably, one of the biggest factors restricting Linux adoption — especially beyond the world of servers, where Linux established a significant foothold long ago and has held on to it since — is simple lack of familiarity with Linux solutions among IT decision-makers.

Proprietary companies, which have large marketing budgets and often an enormous public presence through products that extend beyond the world of the enterprise, enjoy steep advantages when it comes to making sure their products are on the minds of business leaders. Through readily accessible resources such as the Ubuntu Insights portal, Canonical is doing its part to ensure that open source solutions, too, will emit a slightly brighter blip on the radar.

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About the Author(s)

Christopher Tozzi

Contributing Editor

Christopher Tozzi started covering the channel for The VAR Guy on a freelance basis in 2008, with an emphasis on open source, Linux, virtualization, SDN, containers, data storage and related topics. He also teaches history at a major university in Washington, D.C. He occasionally combines these interests by writing about the history of software. His book on this topic, “For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution,” is forthcoming with MIT Press.

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