Opportunity is knocking in the government market for Canonical’s Landscape, a systems management and monitoring tool for Ubuntu systems. Specifically, Autonomic Resources — an integrator that serves the U.S. federal government — is now approved to offer Landscape to government customers running Ubuntu, WorksWithU has learned. Here are some quick details.
First, a little background on selling information technology into the U.S. federal government. Simply put, it isn’t easy. The process can be long and filled with red tape. For starters you need to be on an “approved” list, such as a GSA schedule.
As Fedmarket.com explains:
A GSA schedule contract is an official federal contract but it is not funded and it does not have products or services to deliver immediately. Funding occurs when an order is signed by a federal agency.
To be clear: I’m not stating that Lanscape has officially won U.S. government business. Instead, Autonomic Resources has been approved to offer Landscape on its GSA price list, according to Ken Drachnik, Landscape manager at Canonical. In other words, Canonical has cleared a specific hurdle that makes it easier for Landscape to win potential government business. And naturally, Landscape sales would come in conjunction with government Ubuntu deployments.
Canonical originally offered Landscape in a SaaS (software as a service) configuration. But more recently, Canonical has introduced an on-premise version as well, as Drachnik explains in this WorksWithU podcast.
I hope to gather more details next week — when more federal IT experts return from the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. But in the meantime, I believe the Autonomic Resources relationship could potentially give Canonical, Ubuntu and Landscape a boost in the federal market.
Ubuntu, as WorksWithU previously reported, has scored government and public safety wins across the globe. But I must concede: I’m surprised there aren’t more articles about Ubuntu’s potential strengths and weaknesses for government agencies. We’ll be sure to keep that topic in mind in the weeks ahead.
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Joe:
Wins? Plural? Uhm… okay. Can you cite a second government deployment of note other than the very large French Police deployment? Yes its a large deployment and I think its noteworthy but maybe not for the same reasons you do.
The French police deployment that you reference involved Canonical gifting support services as part of the deployment.
Cananical provided support.. at no cost.[1] Doesn’t say if part of those gifted services were Landscape subscriptions so I won’t assume that they are.
But I have to ask, how do you make money as a service company if you are giving away your services to make deployments happen? It’s a nice gesture and all and I’m sure the French police have nice warm fuzzy feelings..but isn’t support services the point of Canonical’s business plan? At some point Canonical actually has to get paying customers.
But that was several months ago now so maybe that’s changed. Here’s your homework assignment. Is the French goverment contracting with Canonical for any support services now? And if so what services and how much. As this is a government agency the specifics numbers should be a matter of public record I would hope.
-jef
[1]Reference:
http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-the-operating-system-the-french-gendarmerie-goes-for-ubuntu
“The initial migration process was thus tackled without additionalfunds. To support the system in the long run, the Bureau Securité Architecture has decided to contract a commercial partner to give advice to technical issues on a high-level. For this, a public tender has been started, which is a necessary step according to French law. At the moment Canonical Ltd., which is also the potential partner in the future, is giving this support at no costs, as the project is both important and interesting to them. So far, there is no information available as to how high the budget for the third party support will be, as the final decision in the public tender has not been made at the time of this writing.”
>The French police deployment that you reference involved Canonical gifting support services as part of the deployment.
Cananical provided support.. at no cost.[1] Doesn’t say if part of those gifted services were Landscape subscriptions so I won’t assume that they are.
It appears that they would have been. From Canonical’s Landscape page:
>Landscape is free of charge to all of Canonical’s support customers
Can you cite a second government deployment of note other than the very large French Police deployment?
You should at least do a little research before making statements. To name a few
Germany http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2023127.stm
Sweden http://www.osor.eu/news/se-swedish-army-considers-server-migration-to-gnu/?searchterm=None
Brazil http://news.cnet.com/Brazils-love-of-Linux/2009-1042_3-6245409.html
Also the New York Stock Exchange http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207800195
and many banks http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-122267.html
Don’t forget that if they want to sell to the US government, that they need to achieve the EAL certifications like Red Hat has done below…
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government/certifications/#tab3
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government/certifications/#tab1
@Jef
http://leogg.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/20000-ubuntu-laptops-for-teachers-in-nicaragua/
There’s also a mention in this:
http://www.livemint.com/2009/11/03005115/Ubuntu-bets-on-cloud-computing.html
@Jef:
French parliament uses Kubuntu systems[1].
Also, the National Botanic Garden of Belgium[2], which is sort of a government institution, uses Ubuntu too[3].
And there are also the thousands of PCs in schools in Macedonia[4], Andalusia[5] (Spain) and Assam[6] (India) for example.
I think there are more than enough government contracts that have Ubuntu deployments to make the plural “wins” accurate…
(After a refresh before submitting I now also see the Nicaragua case from RyanT.)
[1] http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/informatique/0,39040745,39367717,00.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Botanic_Garden_of_Belgium
[3] http://www.workswithu.com/the-works-with-u-1000/works-with-u-1000-m-0/
[4] http://www.ubuntu.com/news/macedonia-school-computers
[5] http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/Andalusia%20deploys%20220,000%20Ubuntu%20desktops%20in%20schools%20throughout%20the%20region
[6] http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/amtron
RyanT:
Yep, thanks for the reference.
that sucks, I was hoping this would be the year of ubuntu’s demise. guess we’ll have to deal with the crappy debian clone for a bit longer