Canonical, IBM: Ubuntu Will Counter Windows 7 At Lotusphere
Jan. 14th, 2010 by The VAR Guy
Once again, The VAR Guy’s sources were right. Canonical, as our resident blogger expected, is set to announce some Ubuntu news at IBM’s Lotusphere conference in Orlando the week of January 18. The effort — which includes channel partners — will involve Canonical countering Microsoft’s Windows 7 push. Here’s the scoop.
According to a draft press release viewed by The VAR Guy, Canonical will announce…
“a dedicated support program for Lotus Symphony, the no-charge office productivity alternative which is a core component of IBM Client for Smart Work (ICSW) on Ubuntu. This support is made available to customers by Canonical through the IBM and Canonical partner network. Organisations can now switch to an alternative platform from Microsoft for their business productivity needs with full confidence that the core solution is fully supported.”
Any Channel Partners?
Hmmm… Sounds intriguing. But how many VARs and end-customers are really willing to dump Windows for Linux? Before you answer, consider the situation at ZSL, one of the first Canonical and IBM partners to embrace Ubuntu and the IBM Client for Smart Work. According to a prepared statement from Shiv Kumar, executive VP of sales at ZSL:
“The economic case for Ubuntu and the IBM Client for Smart Work is unarguable. The addition of support from Canonical at super-competitive pricing means companies have the reassurance of world class support through the entire stack. We are really excited about bringing this option to our new and existing clients and providing them with cost savings and productivity improvements at a stroke.”
IBM has previously stated Smart Work can save customers up to 50 percent per seat on software costs vs. traditional Microsoft-based desktops. Canonical says the solution includes Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition and Lotus Symphony, which includes word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, fully supported by Canonical at $5.50 per user, per month based on 1000 seat deployment.
Also of note: The solution has an optional desktop virtualization and recovery approach from Virtual Bridges, which has been working closely with IBM and Canonical to develop the Ubuntu virualized desktop market in recent months.
Bob Sutor, VP of Linux and open source at IBM, also lent his name to the press release — a good sign for Canonical’s fledgling enterprise and channel relations.
Reality Check
Of course, it’s important for The VAR Guy to keep these Canonical moves in perspective. The company’s channel remains a work in progress, and the next three months will rank among the most critical in Canonical’s history — due to the forthcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release in April 2010 and the ongoing CEO transition, which should be completed by March 2010.
Meanwhile, Canonical faces still competition on multiple fronts. The buzz around Windows 7 remains generally strong. Plus, entrenched Linux rivals such as Red Hat and Novell seem to be gaining momentum in new areas. Red Hat is busy beta testing a hosted desktop virtualization solution and Novell has been gaining momentum with an appliance approach to SUSE Linux.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Posted In: Open Source | Partner Programs
Tags: Ubuntu 10.04
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
Tags: Ubuntu 10.04
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
I’m hearing they have even bigger plans with something called Lotus Foundations. Rumor has it they are about to crush Microsoft Small Business Server with some announcement about PBX integration.
Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda. It’ll turn out to be a lot of hot air based on past experience. The notion that they’re going to crush SBS is even more laughable.
The simple fact of the matter is that the graphical tools are not good enough and neither is the development system that surrounds the desktop and an application like Symphony. You can’t just throw individual software components at people and throw a price-point over it that you expect to be ‘cheaper’.
Put bluntly, the quality of the software versus the Microsoft ‘competition’ is nowhere near being close enough.
Jason: Please keep The VAR Guy posted.
Segedunum: Your skepticism is healthy. Nobody in the open source market has effectively countered Small Business Server. The VAR Guy thinks SBS’s biggest competition will involve SaaS for small business, rather than some on-premise open source suite.
-TVG
Yadda, yadda, yaddy … yet another pretend admin with only point and click skills. We have four locations using Ubuntu LTS instead of Windoze SBS. And, by the way: virus problems/cost = 0; downtime = 0. Of course, you do have to read the manual to make this work which is probably beyond your point an click skills. But don’t worry I think unemployment benefits have been extended.
I don’t like saying it, but until some distributor starts thinking about putting a lot of open source components together into a distribution that can compete with Windows Server on functionality, on equal terms with the right management tools, then initiatives like this will always be running on empty no matter what niche they back it into.
Any distributor who can start doing that, and it might well be one that does’t exist yet, will explode on to the scene in a big way. The licensing simplification alone would have Microsoft in cardiac arrest. You can only get so far with a drop-in Unix replacement and trying to compete with Red Hat doing all the same things they are, and sadly that’s what Canonical are doing. It’s going to be tough for them.
PC unit sales are looking up, but revenues are not.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/14/pc_sales_jump/
What does this mean for Microsoft’s struggle to recover its sagging profit margins by pushing customers off cut-price Windows XP onto higher-priced Windows Seven? Probably not a lot of success…
“yet another pretend admin with only point and click skills. ”
Wrong actually, and just because a system is easier to administrate and you don’t have to rifle through a manual (or a totally inadequate and incomplete man page) it doesn’t mean someone doesn’t know what something does. It’s a mental disease and silly perception that pervades the open source world.
“Of course, you do have to read the manual to make this work which is probably beyond your point an click skills. But don’t worry I think unemployment benefits have been extended.”
I wondered whether a comment like this would turn up. Let’s divert attention and question someone’s l33tness by bringing up ‘point-and’click’. Wrong actually. I am a died in the wool Linux guy who’s steeped deep in the command line at the moment getting a bunch of systems running on Amazon’s EC2.
Unfortunately, I recoognise that unless a Linux distributor starts creating a competitor to Windows Server and starts to make headway in all those departments where it rules the roost then it is going nowhere fast. Simple fact of life.
@Segedunum
“[...] until some distributor starts thinking about putting a lot of open source components together into a distribution that can compete with Windows Server on functionality, on equal terms with the right management tools, [...]”
There are at least a couple of open source distributions integrating a lot of open source components together with a simple UI to manage all the network services required by SMBs.
You might be interested in taking a look to eBox Platform website and downloading the product:
http://www.ebox-platform.com
Kind regards,
javivazquez
COO at eBox Technologies
That’s what I mean when no one seems to get it. It still falls a very, very, very long way short of the kind of integrated infrastructure Microsoft provides and why people seem to be confused as to why they’re so widely used in organisations and why things like eDirectory are rapidly being outflanked and replaced by Active Directory. Things fit together. That’s why being able to plug into Active Directory is such a requirement for these types of systems and why they have such a hard time existing as solutions in their own right. Just ask Novell and eDirectory.
Active Directory -> Exchange -> Joining desktops and servers *easily* for single sign-on and other resources -> Programming components and APIs to integrate those components in third-party apps -> Easily installed management tools
They all fit together. Some might say that’s lock-in, and yer it is, but the simple fact is that organisations expect all of these things to fit together pretty easily.
There is no way right now that you could move your Windows servers and desktops to a Linux and open source equivalent in a standardised way with the same level of single sign-on ease and management, certainly where desktops are concerned.
Segedunum, let me say that we have been seeing more and more interest in migrating from Microsoft SBS (e.g: AD+Exchange+ISA) to eBox, as it is, in the last weeks. Depending on how a SMB is using AD, a migration it’s feasible or not, but most of the times it is.
Moreover, have you checked eBox’s features? eBox is able to plug into Active Directory:
http://trac.ebox-platform.com/wiki/Document/Documentation/EBoxActiveDirectorySync
However, you are probably right, we -eBox and other open source projects like eBox- are not “there” yet. We are still trying to disrupt the SMB servers market, but we are on the way up:
“In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. [...]”
Kind regards,
javivazquez
COO at eBox Technologies
The Var Guy:
“The VAR Guy thinks SBS’s biggest competition will involve SaaS for small business, rather than some on-premise open source suite.”
Yes, you are right. It’s not only a competition SaaS vs SBS though, I guess that Microsoft is already walking that path: services from the physical office to the cloud (Azure).
So, here my 2 cents:
Everyone seems to be worried about ruling the cloud space (“sky”) showing an offer there, but what about the “sky’s door”?
I mean, in the short and medium term (at least) there will the need for a server that connects the LAN with the cloud. Whoever owns the key of that “sky’s door”, it’s in charge of connecting SMBs with a cloud or another (or with all of them). Currently, the key is SBS and the keeper is Microsoft.
What do you think?
“… is that organisations expect all of these things to fit together …”
I doubt that most small organizations really care about single sign-on or if their small number of systems “fit together”. Most workgroups are way too small for single sign-on to make any real difference.
If one my employees can’t remember passwords for four applications needed at my company (file server, e-mail, ERP system, private web server) it is surely a sign that I need to upgrade that employee. Most employees have way more personal passwords than work passwords anyway.
In fact, with trends toward use of personal PCs and non-PC devices at/for work and toward use of web and other centrally managed applications I expect that tools like Active Directory which mainly helps in managing the unmanageable Windows client will fade away.