Canonical has begun beta testing a managed storage service — known as Ubuntu One (pictured) — that allows Ubuntu 9.04 users to share and sync files between multiple Ubuntu PCs. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
The service, known as Ubuntu One, is in beta and available in two formats:
- Free for up to 2GB of storage
- $10 for a 10GB monthly storage plan
At $10 per month, Ubuntu One won’t make Canonical rich. But Ubuntu’s installed base stands at around 10 million or more desktops and services, The VAR Guy estimates. And the potential user base for Ubuntu One is growing rapidly each month.
Multiple Revenue Streams
Ubuntu One represents Canonical’s latest attempt to build profitable recurring revenue services around the company’s popular Linux distribution.
Another Canonical initiative, called Landscape, involves closed source software that allows VARs and IT administrators to remotely manage Ubuntu servers, desktops and mobile devices. Over time, Landscape could emerge as a managed services platform for VARs that specailize in Ubuntu, The VAR Guy believes.
Channel Chatter
Meanwhile, Canonical’s partner program remains a work in progress — but there are some signs of momentum.
Canonical this month is launching new training programs for Ubuntu Server Edition, And Hewlett-Packard is expected to begin certifying its ProLiant Servers to run Ubuntu shortly.
In the meantime, The VAR Guy has reached out to Canonical seeking more information about the Ubuntu One managed storage service.
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That’s pretty clever. It’s nice to see that Canonical hasn’t abandoned its consumer desktop strategy in favor of a purely enterprise push. I’m looking forward to hearing more.
Josh: The VAR Guy thinks Ubuntu One is more than a consumer move. Imagine business users syncing/sharing files between their Ubuntu netbooks and office desktops… …
Sorry to see there’s no reseller or agent program (at least not yet) for Ubuntu One. But it’s still in beta. The VAR Guy is watching.
an ubuntu only service is at a disadvantage to something like dropbox which is cross platform. the fact that existing LTS release also limits its corporate applicability for the moment.
this also needs to compared to the existing gnome conduit application which is a sync client that supports multiple web services vendors and sync usage cases.
it will be intersting if canonical will feel comfortable releasing the number of paid subscriptions in a year’s time. landscape has been around for two years now and canonical has yet to publicly talk about the number of paying customers and that is a pretty unique service offering. canonical might have an even tougher time getting people to pay for ubuntuone plans in competition with other services like jungledisk or dropbox.
-jef
I think it’s a good first step, it’s a bit like the mac.com account. It can be argued that you can integrate your iDisk easily with Ubuntu. I am not sure if it’s meant to compete with dropbox but i suppose we will see…
In any case as a casual user who wants to back up a few files I think this might be ideal.
[...] working on a new software as a service offering called Ubuntu One. This news was broken today by the VAR guy, but we thought we would dig a little deeper into what it is all about. Ubuntu One is in short a [...]
@K. Aning:
When you say ideal… are you talking about the free subscription plan or are you talking about the for-pay subscription? The real test is, and always been, can Canonical actually generate revenue for any of its service offerings. I’m sure Ubuntu users will pick up the free subscription and use it casually. There’s no question about that. But like everything Canonical does.. gratis deployments and gratis account usage and uptake don’t automatically mean its sustainable business model.
It appears Canonical is going to be looking for 3rd party application developers to build value-add for the UbuntuOne service by coding support for the service directly into applications according to the abstract they have for OSCON.
http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/8843
Time will tell if open application developers are going to want to tie application functionality strongly to a closed source storage solution like UbuntuOne. The dynamics in the community with regard to closed/open web services is very complicated…as illustrated in the support for identi.ca versus twitter.
-jef
@Jef As a developer, that argument doesn’t really hold water for me. I don’t care if server-side software is open source or not, as long as
1) it lets me get my data in and out of the service is supports, and
2) there’s demand for the service.
Without taking mob-mentality into the equation, I’ll tie pretty much any application I write to a pertinent service that meets those requirements. I’d bet that there’s a lot of other developers out there who feel the same way… though we may not make splashes in sensationalist press
You alluded to a good point, though: Canonical needs enthusiastic, vocal, 3-rd party developers who are capable of communicating to the a wider audience with simple instructions and code snippets. This needs to be done in such a way that even non-developers are lured into the fold. Apple has done this with great success on multiple occasions; Canonical has yet to accomplish such a feat. They tend to produce APIs that only hard-core developers take time with or advantage of, and that’s not a successful business model for services aimed at the individual consumer. A hip buzz machine would do Canonical a world of good.
Perhaps this will become an alternative offering with Ubuntu partner, Dell, since they offer something like this along with their MS Windows computers.
http://Sync.live.com
25 GB of FREE storage.
Sync two or more computers.
Share photo albums.
Download files from anywhere on any of your sync computers’ hard drives.
Works with Mac (10.5 or higher) and Windows computers.
Beat that and I’ll be interested enough to try it.
Duncan:
Its ironic really. Canonical, an advocate for open development, seems to miss the point about the power of code access and collaborative development as an instructive tool to aid other developers when it comes to its own web services. In an effort to protect the viability of their own business, they are making it more difficult than it needs to be by being opaque.
That being said…you should watch f-spot in launchpad. There is a proposed sprint for UDS which talks about patching f-spot to support the UbuntuOne storage stuff. If you want to review code snippets, watch the patch commits against the f-spot package for Karmic.
-jef