Seeking to promote Ubuntu to resellers and distributors, Canonical is making a surprise appearance this week at CompTIA Breakaway in Washington, D.C. Here, Canonical is outlining seven potential profit opportunities for partners that back Ubuntu, a Linux distribution that has mobile, desktop, server and cloud computing capabilities. Equally important, Canonical is promoting Landscape — a remote management tool — for VARs and MSPs.
To cash in on Ubuntu, Canonical is telling partners to focus on customers and prospects that are experiencing one or more of the following business pain points:
- High licensing costs for proprietary systems;
- Difficulty monitoring and managing servers or desktops;
- Slow, manual software updates and patching;
- Inability to ensure all machines are patched to the same level;
- Inability to provide enterprise-class support across servers or desktops;
- Unacceptable systems downtime; and/or
- Requirement to set up and take down new applications frequently.
Canonical outlines those seven partner opportunities as part of the Ubuntu Advantage partner program push. Canonical announced the new partner program about a week ago. Robin Barley-Waegener, a channel development manager at Canonical, is attending Breakaway to educate potential partners about the program.
The VAR Guy caught Barley-Waegener’s ear at CompTIA Breakaway. Our resident blogger also inspected Canonical’s new marketing and promotional materials. Simply put: Canonical finally looks like a company that’s serious about engaging channel partners.
Canonical’s partner strategy also pushes beyond Ubuntu. The company’s new marketing materials focus heavily on Landscape, a remote monitoring and management tool that VARs and MSPs can use to maintain customer networks. Landscape’s four core capabilities include package management; automation (for creating scripts); systems monitoring and cloud management.
Reality Check
The VAR Guy realizes that Canonical faces an uphill battle — especially in the North American software market.
In the server market, Canonical must somehow carve out a niche against Windows Server, Red Hat and SUSE Linux. Red Hat North America Channel Chief Roger Egan also is attending Breakaway. And SUSE Linux (now owned by Attachmate) also seems to be preparing new channel and cloud investments.
Sources say Canonical has some big server and cloud partner wins brewing in Europe and India… and the company is hoping to leverage those wins into the U.S. market.
Meanwhile, the desktop and mobile markets also represent fierce challenges for Canonical in North America. Although Ubuntu is widely considered the most popular desktop Linux distribution, Microsoft has solidified its desktop dominance with Windows 7, Apple is running strong with Mac OS X, and mobile offerings like Google Android and Apple iOS present further competitive challenges to Ubuntu, The VAR Guy believes.
Still, remember this: Woody Allen once said that “80 percent of success is just showing up.” With that thought in mind, Canonical is finally showing up at major channel events.
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Totally agree, showing up is 80% of success, otherwise what is the point of being the most popular Linux (free)OS when they don’t make their presence felt.
Such a good & stable OS deserves more users. The number one point on their list being avoiding high licensing costs is very smart, especially, in this tough economy.
Paul: Thanks for adding your insights. The VAR Guy was pleasantly surprise to see Canonical at the Breakaway conference. But our resident blogger wonders: Does the seven-point list differentiate Canonical enough from Red Hat and SUSE?
-TVG
«Simply put: Canonical finally looks like a company that’s serious about engaging channel partners.»
I think they’ve handled this very well. Never before has Canonical really been ready for business like they are now. In my opinion, 10.04LTS was the first version of Ubuntu that was really ready for serious business, although 8.04 was very good too. But it’s been missing that little extra. The way things are progressing, 12.04LTS will be a seriously cool operating system; super efficient workflow, aesthetically pleasing and with some infrastructure that makes it perfect for tailoring to specific business needs. It’s easy to see how a business might want their own lenses for their own internal data, custom appindicators, etc. And although your colleague says the keyboard is for geeks, the people I know who’s best at using it for all its worth have mostly been normal office workers. And Ubuntu really rocks at that now.
I have no worries about Ubuntu. Ubuntu One, though… Well, let’s just say something needs to be done and quickly. You simply cannot allow a service to be down for months without explanation or when to expect it to return. If they do fix this and are able to fulfill its promises in time for 12.04LTS’ release, then that certainly also helps making Ubuntu a very attractive platform. Perhaps they might even sell their Ubuntu One service as a private service to businesses.
«Microsoft has solidified its desktop dominance with Windows 7, Apple is running strong with Mac OS X, and mobile offerings like Google Android and Apple iOS present further competitive challenges to Ubuntu, The VAR Guy believes.»
Microsoft and Apple is going to be around. But several people I know who’s currently using OS X on their desktops and know Ubuntu well, says drivers and support for specific applications is the only real advantage OS X has. Well, drivers are improving, and it has become much easier to know which computers are well supported. Apple only supports a few models and they are very expensive, whereas Ubuntu supports many models ranging from very cheap to very expensive. This helps. And we’re seeing clear signs of Ubuntu becoming an attractive platform for partners, so it isn’t surprising if much of that software becomes available in the not-so-distant future.
Another thing is that Ubuntu supports Windows as well as both Android and Ios, whereas Apple only supports Ios. So in short, I’m really optimistic. People said Linux would never stand a chance in the market for mobile phones in competition with Symbian and Windows Mobile. That situation certainly changed quickly, didn’t it?
[...] Canonical Sees Seven Opportunities for Ubuntu Partners Seeking to promote Ubuntu to resellers and distributors, Canonical is making a surprise appearance this week at CompTIA Breakaway in Washington, D.C. Here, Canonical is outlining seven potential profit opportunities for partners that back Ubuntu, a Linux distribution that has mobile, desktop, server and cloud computing capabilities. Equally important, Canonical is promoting Landscape — a remote management tool — for VARs and MSPs. [...]
Jo-Erlend Schinstad@3: The VAR Guy thanks you for the additional insights. Quick question — when you reference growing Linux popularity on smartphones are you referring to Android? If so, isn’t it interesting that Google doesn’t really use Linux in its branding of Android? Perhaps that’s one reason Android has succeeded — Google built a popular consumer name/brand rather than using an IT name…
-TVG
Up till now, people who have been using free software operating systems have often been very technical users. They can mostly understand what Linux is. Normal users can’t. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an easy and correct explanation of what Linux is. How many times have I heard people ask if Linux has a start-button like Windows does? Many. I’ve usually just told people that Linux is what handles hardware. It isn’t entirely true, but I think that’s the only thing a normal user needs to know.
Marketing Ubuntu and Android as both being Linuxes, is very misleading. They aren’t mostly the same. They have a few things in common, but are much more different than alike. So I think it’s a good thing that Ubuntu and Android aren’t being branded as Linux-systems. End-users shouldn’t use a system because it’s based on Linux, but because the system as a whole is a good one. Developers need to know about Linux, and Linux should be branded as a kernel and nothing else.