I must concede: Sometimes I worry Canonical is trying to do too much too soon with Ubuntu. From mobile devices all the way to enterprise servers and cloud computing, founder Mark Shuttleworth has big aspirations for Ubuntu. There are times when I think Canonical is stretched too thin on multiple fronts. But just when I get really worried, the company makes a major move that impresses me. A case in point: Open source expert Matt Asay has joined Canonical as chief operating officer. It’s a big move for Canonical, Ubuntu and Asay. Here’s why.
Asay arrives at a critical time in Canonical’s history. The company is transitioning the CEO role from Mark Shuttleworth to Jane Silber. A major product launch (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx) seek to push Canonical much deeper in the business market, from mobile devices to cloud computing. And Canonical continues to launch and build new new services like Landesk Landscape and Ubuntu One.
So why do I worry? When I speak with Canonical insiders, I sometimes sense the enormity of the challenges they’re facing. Different product groups are working toward different goals. Somebody has to coordinate all those efforts. That’s where Silber and Asay enter the picture.
Asay’s track record at Alfresco and Novell on open source business matters is strong. He understands how to monetize open source without alienating a community — a difficult balancing act for many commercial open source efforts.
And full disclosure: I’ve met Asay a few times. And I’ve linked to his blog, The Open Road, over and over again because of his business insights.
Asay explains his move to Canonical in his own blog. And Canonical says Asay will be:
“Responsible for aligning strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.
Most recently VP, Business Development for Alfresco, Asay has been involved with open source since 1998, and is one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists.”
As I’ve pointed out multiple times, Canonical has grand ambitions in multiple software markets. The company needs an expanded executive team to potentially meet those lofty goals. Asay arrives just in time.
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This will be interesting. I think you are right, that Canonical is at a launching off point that can either take flight, or …
Hopefully they will make it. Regardless, though, it is going to be one wild ride for the next couple of years for sure!
Dragonbite: I’m a bit biased on the topic. I know Asay so I think it’s a smart move by Canonical. I believe Canonical also has the right strategy … investing in multiple growth opportunities rather than betting the company on one area (desktop Linux). But all those projects certainly put stress on Canonical’s management team and employees.
-jp
Good luck Canonical!
Let’s see if Matt is as forthcoming about Canonical’s financial performance quarter to quarter moving forward as he has been about Alfreso’s in his Cnet blog.
-jef
Jef: Are there any privately held open source companies that offer quarter to quarter performance updates?
-jp
Joe:
You look deep into Matt’s Cnet blog. He’s made very specific statements about alfresco’s performance quarter to quarter repeatedly for several quarters now..makin it a point to say Alfreso continues to hit sales targets for several quarters in a row. It’s not an auditted financial statement like you see in public companies but its far more specific than Canonical has been with regard to its financials. You look even further back right before the economy started to tank and he was doing a good job of laying the ground work for an Alfreso IPO that never happened.
In the future I expected him to be more muzzled with regard to Canonical performance in his own blog.
-jef
Hi
Does anyone know what was Matt’s involvement in Novell? I certainly dislike a lot of Novell’s Linux moves, from the “blackmailing pact” with MS to the development of MS’s entrenched Mono libraries. I hate to sound negative, but it would be reassuring to know he was not part of all that.
Thanks!
Leo
Landesk? You mean Landscape, right?
I’ve followed Matt’s column pretty much since the beginning. For an open source ‘expert’ it was quite surprising that he hadn’t even tried Ubuntu or used Linux in any meaningful way at all until about 18 months ago, which he wrote about in his blog. Also for quite a while he seemed particularly enamored of all things Apple – and a more closed source and closed everything company one would be hard pressed to find. Finally, numerous posts of his cast Canonical and Ubuntu and other companies with similar business models in a rather negative light from a business point of view: he really seemed incapable of conceiving that giving away the full software stack and charging only for service was a viable business model. (And it’s certainly not Alfresco’s model.)
So frankly it’s surprising that he’s now in a senior management position at Canonical. Now, I’m not at all acquainted with Matt and really don’t know what exactly his responsibilities were at Alfresco. Obviously he has ability and talents. But I’m afraid I do have to wonder about his grasp of the entire open source ethos and m.o. of a project like Ubuntu. I certainly hope, in particular, that this doesn’t mean that Canonical is considering a move away from their commitment to ‘Free and Open Source always’ for Ubuntu in all it’s permutations. We already have Red Hat. Ubuntu is different.
Thanks ArtInvent for the insight. The thing I don’t quite follow is your comment about Red Hat, which to me is THE example of selling OS support (not the software stack). You can have access to all their source code, which is what Cent OS is all about. Actually, Red Hat is to me the perfect example of a successful truly Open Source business.
The difference with Ubuntu is that RedHat has been traditional service, because they realized it is hard to sell desktop support for home users. But there are still some markets to make a _lot_ of money off of:
* corporate desktops
* cloud computing
And, not with support, but in the form of customization contracts to produce OEM versions and support them via specialized repositories, you also have
* netbooks, umpc/s
* embedded
* nettops
Oh well, hope this move doesn’t go the wrong way.
Errata: on of the sentences I typed above was a mess: “The difference with Ubuntu is that RedHat has been traditional service, because they realized it is hard to sell desktop support for home users. ”
What I meant to say is that RedHat has been focused on the traditional server space, basically selling a much better Unix for less. They have done that because they realized that it is hard to make money out of home users directly (by selling support, for instance, or nicely packaged software).
I have nothing against Red Hat, they have a great product and a lot of success and their position in open source is unassailable. But their monetization business model is very different from Ubuntu’s and not just because one is more server and the other is more desktop. CentOS may be fantastic but it’s not RHEL. You have to buy RHEL. If you install and use CentOS you are not going to be able to just go and call Red Hat and get them to support and service that, paid or otherwise. With Ubuntu, there is no such distinction. Install the full official of Ubuntu with no restrictions, and if you decide you need paid support: boom, it’s available. This is not just a technicality, it’s a substantially different approach.
Well, it seems like a technicality to me, what they sell you is the support. The reason they want you to use the RHEL binaries is that they have control over those, I’d think. Big corporations love that, and they “validate” a given platform, and that’s all people can do in the corporate machines, the blessed binaries. I think RedHat is recognizing that.
But I understand that they don’t distribute these binaries free of charge (something Ubuntu I think promised to do for ever), and that, I agree, is kind of a biggie. It makes it much simpler for someone with no cash to run the exact same binaries as the ones buying support. My point is that people don’t pay for the binaries, but for the validation/support. So, in my view, Red Hat would loose nothing if they distributed RHEL for free, but it’s probably a bit late for them to change that.
I echo what ArtInvent had said about Matt Asay.
Look at this guy’s post in Mar 2008. Can you believe such a newbie in Ubuntu can now be the COO in Canonical?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9889681-16.html
I used to follow his blog for a while as he is the only one in Cnet who focused on writing about open source. But I stopped following him sometime ago because I found his articles lack of insight. Frankly, I seriously doubt Matt has the ability to make Ubuntu a better OS. As a Ubuntu user, though, I do hope he can prove me wrong.
Jim:
Matt’s job won’t be to make Ubuntu a better OS. Matt’s job will be to make Canonical a better business. There a big difference between those two tasks. There’s a huge difference.
-jef
Ryan@8: Sorry about that error. Thanks for pointing it out. I made the correction.
-jp
ArtInvent@9+12:
Canonical has yet to show that their business model of completely optional support offerings is actually sustainable. 6 years into the Canonical business experiment. Canonical as of the December 2009 announcement of the CEO change is still running at a loss according to on record statements from Canonical execs (and Shuttleworth..who I guess is technically no longer an executive in the technical sense of the word).
Deployment numbers != profitability. If Canonical’s optional services hold no value to users then it doesn’t matter how large a userbase Ubuntu has…people aren’t going to buy the optional services. Who’s buying Landscape subscriptions? Who’s buying annual technical support contracts? Who’s buying engineering consulting? Who in the Ubuntu userbase is going to standup and say without reservation that they pay money to Canonical and get good service value in return? I don’t see many customer testimonials. I see a lot of user testimonials. I see a lot of partner testimonials…but where are Canonical’s customers? Because its the strength of the customerbase that define the health a business model.
-jef
I am really shocked! Matt Assay just discovered Desktop Linux!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10455816-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheOpenRoad
I don’t think this kind of hiring can be very good for the morale of the Canonical team. Oh well!
Loss-making at such scale is indeed a rightful concern to all Ubuntu warriors. I’d LOVE to see the books.