Canonical remains committed to Landscape — the remote systems management platform for Ubuntu. But one of the Landscape team members has joined Dell, according to sources close to the hardware giant. Here’s the update.
I want to be careful with this post. It’s important to note that employees come and go — but software and IT services typically live on. With that qualifier in mind, I’ve heard that Landscape marketing veteran Ken Drachnik has joined Dell. I first heard chatter about the move during several meetings in Austin, Texas, this week. I’ve sent a note to Drachnik to see what he’ll be working on at Dell.
Back at Canonical, COO Matt Asay confirms that Drachnik has left the company but he says Landscape continues to receive more resources within Canonical. In the days ahead, I will pursue deeper info about Canonical’s latest Landscape efforts.
As you may recall, Canonical has positioned Landscape as a systems management tool for Ubuntu servers, desktops, mobile devices and cloud resources. Landscape is available as a SaaS service (called Landscape Hosted Edition) or as an on-premise solution (Landscape Dedicated Server Edition). It can also be used by VARs and managed services providers (MSPs) to remotely manage customers’ Ubuntu networks.
Landscape is one of several efforts that could generate new revenue streams beyond traditional Ubuntu support. Canonical has developed a few Landscape customer case studies but I haven’t heard from too many readers who are running the platform. Meanwhile, it sounds like Dell will announce some updated Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud efforts within the next few weeks. Stay tuned.
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It is a mischaracterisation to imply that Landscape is a newer support offering compared to something more traditional. The web-based Landscape service is the oldest service product that Canonical has available. If anything is tradional its Landscape.
So how well is Landscape doing? How many registered systems? If Canonical is on record with 12 million users… are we talking 1% Landscape adoption across the userbase? Or more? Or less?
I continually find it ironic that Canonical is comfortable throwing out _estimates_ on userbase every release cycle but has never volunteered to provide hard numbers on the number of registered Landscape clients which would require no estimate and represent a very clear picture of the health of their support _business_.
-jef
-jef
I was a Landscape beta tester. Durring testing I had mixed results. I got good response from the team, but it would cause some heavily loaded systems to seem more loaded. That was never fixed. I would have looked into it myself, but for an open source project, it is very secret. And that is my biggest problem with it, and why I still have not considered deployment… Where is the code? Where is the community? And what does it give me that I can not get with cacti and webmin (admittedly with more setup work) that have both code and community out in the open?
Jef: I concede — Landscape deployment facts/figures are difficult to come by. But I will be sure to ask those questions as we continue our coverage.
Lee: Unless I missed something, Landscape is not an open source project.
-jp
Joe:
No landscape is not an open source project. Even the dedicated server software which runs on a customers hardware is a proprietary software image. And to my knowledge no Canonical representative has ever suggested that it was going to be opened at any point in the future. And since its not part of the Ubuntu development toolset (no contributor to Ubuntu is asked or required to interact with Landscape to do their work) there’s no argument to be made that Ubuntu as a project benefits from it being opened (in contrast to the arguments for the opening of Launchpad)
The only people outside of the Canonical fenceline who have standing to influence the opening of Landscape outside of Canonical are the active and potential customers of the Landscape service. I haven’t seen anyone who is evaluating Landscape as a service offering make any public request that it be opened. And certainly Canonical has never suggested that it would be.
-jef