Ubuntu Surprises at Lotusphere 2010?
The major Linux distribution providers — Red Hat, Novell and Canonical — are preparing to attend IBM’s Lotusphere 2010 conference (Orlando, January 17-21). The VAR Guy is keeping a particularly close eye on Canonical, backer of Ubuntu. Here’s why.
Sure, Red Hat and Novell are firmly entrenched on corporate servers. But Canonical is trying its best to crack the corporate market. A case in point: Canonical recently changed its enterprise server support licensing. Basically, the price for Advanced (24/7) support is now US$1200 per Ubuntu server and the 10 incident limit on both standard and advanced support was removed, notes one source close to Canonical.
Canonical’s enterprise push also includes closer work with IBM and Lotus. In October 2009, IBM partnered up with Canonical and Ubuntu to counter Windows 7. And back at Lotusphere 2008, IBM vowed to ensure Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony supported Ubuntu.
It’s safe to expect similar IBM-Canonical news at the 2010 Lotusphere event, The VAR Guy hears. Updated January 14, 1:42 p.m. eastern: Canonical just confirmed its Lotusphere plans.
Already, Alfresco — an open source content management specialist — has disclosed its plans for Lotusphere. The VAR Guy has an educated hunch that Canonical will do the same in the next few days.
Calling All Software Developers
Meanwhile, Canonical is working overtime to solidify ISV (independent software vendor) relationships with a range of smaller software companies. Listen for potential ISV news on or around the time of the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release in April 2010.
Ubuntu 10.04, a long term support (LTS) release, will target cloud, server, desktop and mobile systems. As part of the Ubuntu 10.04 initiative, Canonical’s John Pugh has been working closely with a range of ISVs. The following FastChat video, shot back in September 2009, reveals some of Pugh’s priorities:
The next four months will rank among the most critical in Canonical’s five-year history. In addition to the ISV and Ubuntu 10.04 efforts, Caninical is transitioning its CEO responsibilities from Mark Shuttleworth to Jane Silber.
The VAR Guy will continue his Canonical watch at Lotusphere.
Sort of related: has TVG heard that Panasonic is migrating 300,000 employees off Microsoft Exchange and onto LotusLive?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10434664-62.html
Simplicius: The VAR Guy hadn’t seen that report. Microsoft remains pretty darn strong in the server software market (Exchange, SharePoint, etc.) but the company seems to be under attack from a range of FOSS alternatives for content management and email/collaboration (Alfresco, Zimbra, Open-Xchange, and plenty more…)
-TVG
Until a distributor creates a ‘credible’ open source competitor to Windows Server then Canonical is simply making pretty patterns in the snow. They will never make headway against Red Hat until they work out how to do that, and neither will Novell.
“open source” to “make headway against Red Hat”—what an odd thing to say.
““open source” to “make headway against Red Hat”—what an odd thing to say.”
Errrrrrr, no I didn’t say that actually. You’ve joined two parts of two related, but orthogonal, sentences together. Even then, to suggest that companies like Canonical are not competing against Red Hat is just plain silly.
The only way to compete in the Linux distribution world against Red Hat, because they’re the number one, is to start creating something different and competing and moving beyond the traditional Linux and Unix worlds. To do that then a Windows Server competitor is required.
At this point a lot of people wade into the discussion in an obviously uncomfortable way, simply because they know it cannot be done as many Linux distributions currently stand.