Canonical has made a subtle but important shift in its channel partner strategy. Sure, the Ubuntu Linux promoter continues to engage with solutions providers. But increasingly, Canonical wants to recruit hosting partners and cloud partners onto the Ubuntu bandwagon. Here’s why.
The story starts at HostingCon, an industry conference held last month in Austin, Texas. While there, The VAR Guy caught up with Robin Barley-Waegener, a member of Canonical’s channel partner organization.
During a brief booth-side chat, Barley-Waegener confirmed Canonical’s continued commitment to solutions providers. But she also pointed to her top priority: Getting hosting partners to embrace Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. It sounds like Canonical is expects to pilot EUC with roughly 10 hosting partners by year’s end.
More Ubuntu Cloud Talk
Meanwhile, Canonical spent time at the recent OSCON conference describing the company’s cloud strategy. Barton George, a cloud evangelist at Dell, captured this video conversation with Neil Levine, VP of Canonical’s corporate services division:
At the same time, Canonical continues to embrace Eucalyptus, an open source cloud platform that’s compatible with Amazon Web Services.
The VAR Guy is intrigued but key questions remain. For starters how does Canonical intend to compete with Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management (designed for on-premises and cloud environments) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which Red Hat is promoting to cloud partners?
Hmmm… Plenty of questions awaiting plenty of answers. But ultimately, Canonical’s Barley-Waegener is focused on one priority: Lining up more hosting and cloud partners for Ubuntu.
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How does the introduction of the openstack project change the hosting landscape and the competitiveness of Eucalyptus? Note that NASA dropped Eucalyptus internally specifically because the open version does not scale…and Eucalyptus is not making it easy for users…users like NASA with the technical ability to contribute back..to patch the system to replace pieces with implementations that scale better.
If Eucalyptus can’t scale for NASA, is it going to scale out well for hosting providers?
-jef