What do you do when your partners also become some of your most important customers? That’s a challenge Canonical executives grappled with recently as they moved to restructure Canonical’s relationship with OEMs. Here’s what’s changed at the company, and what it means for the open source channel.
As Canonical CEO Jane Silber pointed out in a recent blog post, OEM partnerships have been key to distributing Canonical’s main product, the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Agreements with server manufacturers in particular have helped Ubuntu gain a significant presence on enterprise machines.
But as Silber also explained, in many cases the OEMs have begun using Ubuntu themselves, transforming not just into partners but also customers. In addition, the increasing importance of OEMs as liaisons between Canonical and corporate customers has also nuanced the role they play within the Ubuntu ecosystem.
As a result, Canonical has restructured parts of its sales and support staff. OEM operations and corporate services will be merged into one arm, the Sales and Business Development team, under the direction of Chris Kenyon.
Support and marketing efforts have been restructured as well, as Silber detailed in her blog post, although she also firmly emphasized that other parts of the organization — particularly those focused on software design and development — remain unaltered.
OEMs and Ubuntu’s Future
On their face, these internal changes at Canonical are not huge news. But there’s a bigger story here, namely one about Canonical’s strategy for expanding the use of Ubuntu among different sets of users.
Clearly, corporate customers stand at the front and center of Canonical’s business plan. The company believes, probably rightly, that its long-term commercial sustainability lies in selling Ubuntu support services and related products to large enterprises.
Meanwhile, Silber’s announcement was notable for what it didn’t mention: partnerships with OEMs shipping Ubuntu on hardware designed for single users, such as personal computers. Although Canonical made big headlines several years ago when it convinced Dell to not just ship Ubuntu on consumer PCs but also to advertise it to the general public, these sorts of OEM partnerships — with Dell or anyone else — seems no longer to be a priority for Canonical.
Not that we should blame Canonical, of course. Dell’s Ubuntu offerings were hit-and-miss, and other Ubuntu-friendly OEMs, such as ZaReason and System76, are too small to provide many serious business opportunities for Canonical. OEM partnerships on this front just didn’t pay off.
All the same, there’s every reason to believe Ubuntu will remain the most popular Linux distribution among consumers for a long time to come, even if Canonical’s business initiatives remain more focused on the server market and corporate desktops. But don’t expect to buy your next Ubuntu PC from Dell.
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I don’t think you have the full story about direct to consumer sales.
Did you miss the news about Dell/Canonical opening up staffed kiosks in Chinese retail stores? You can’t look at the US and EU markets and get the full story about consumer OEM strategies. The reality is China and India are huge mostly untapped growth markets for all consumers goods. Not just computers…everything. There has also been a recent announcement about Asus preloading Ubuntu in asian markets. And there was also news about Lenovo offering models in asia as well. You have to dig for it, you have to _ask_ _questions_ to get the full picture.
The US and EU are saturated markets. And being saturated markets there’s much larger barrier to entry for newcomers. If Canonical and OEM partners are focusing on Ubuntu offerings in emerging consumer markets (and all evidence says they are) then that’s actually pretty savvy business decision. Why beat your head against the brickwall in a stagnant mature US market, when you can go after a piece of a growing market in Asia?
-jef
If you’ll pardon me for pointing out the obvious to a bunch of professionals whose job it is to STAY RIGHT ON TOP OF THESE THINGS,
this is the first thing of any substance I’ve heard of Jane Silber in, oh, say, a year or more.
As a matter of fact, I was going to write a memo to a magazine just the other evening on this very subject (i.e., Canonical’s ghost of a CEO), but I COULDN’T EVEN REMEMBER HER NAME, so I decided to put the task aside in favor of much more productive tasks.
So, now…
1. What, exactly, does Jane Silber do? (Pu-leeze, don’t give me a press release)
2. How long has Jane Silber been on the job in her current capacity?
3. Since Ubuntu/Canononical started going into the tank, what EXACTLY CEO-specific actions has she taken to turn things around (Pu-leeze, don’t give me a press release). In order to make things hard on Shuttleworth, since one of his consummate skills is NOT answering direct questions, let’s peg this time frame at the time 9.10 appeared, or at the time that Jane Silber appeared, whichever occurred first.
4. What, EXACTLY, was Jane Silber hired to do, Mark Shuttleworth?
No prevarications or circumlocutions allowed; AND,PU-LEEZE, don’t give me ANY press releases. We do NOT want to know that Ms. Silber was hired to allow other people to do other jobs, e.g.
5. Can we expect Jane Silber to make any CEO-level decisions which stand a snowball’s-chance-in-hell of turning Ubuntu around in the three-to-four year time frame.
CALL-A-SPADE-A-SPADE time:
I’m sure I’m not the only one of the legions of Linux followers who could not name–off the top of their head–the CEO of Canonical.
Precious little, and I DO mean LITTLE, has been heard of Ms. Silber since she was hired.
Your back-to-the-wall, Shuttleworth: did you hire Silber as only a figurehead? If not, how has she held her job throughout all the Ubuntu disasters?
Did you hire her to have someone to blame three years from now?
Happens all the time, Ms. Silber; start negotiating a REALLY great golden parachute now. The clock’s ticking.
Absolutely… She should jump around like a monkey and laugh at successful competitors, like good CEOs do.
I think Android has already surpassed Ubuntu to be the most popular Linux.
Sure, and the web is more popular than Windows. So what?