Ubuntu enters corporate market

At the still-ongoing first Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Canonical founder and Ubuntu CEO Mark Shuttleworth shared his intentions to enter the corporate market with others. Shuttleworth said that with its freest and most humane OS in the world, Canonical is able to provide servers with the means and support that it provided for desktops: ease of use, performance and compatibility.

Over the past two or three years, the popularity of Ubuntu has greatly increased. Mark said that Ubuntu is installed on 6-12 million computers located in more than 200 countries (the numbers vary greatly due to the fact that the disks with the distribution kit often go on hands). And now, when the “humane-to-human OS” has won a place under the sun on the desktops, the time has come to look closely at the corporate market.

Linux is already entering the corporate environment through thin clients and specialized, dedicated systems. According to Mark, in order for Ubuntu to become a strong player in the corporate software market, it needs to work well in virtual machines (the Ubuntu 7.04 distribution is great here) and also serve as a platform for improving monitoring tools and information management systems. As for the latter, here Canonical relies on Landscape , its own online client management system for small and medium businesses. Mark announced Landscape on Ubuntu Live - now this system is available for free to subscribers of Canonical support services.