Ubuntu offers a supreme ease of use and setup, and excellent hardware support, and incidentally I think its positioned uniquely, because of that fact, to offer more than just the standard commercial Linux server package. With Dell now offering Ubuntu PC’s (although not to businesses, but I’ll get to that in a moment), and with the first fully supported, targeted version of Ubuntu (Ubuntu Studio) out the gates Canonical can position itself to offer solutions to business much better than it could before, and also in a way other distros are not uniquely advantaged in.
Lets take a look at Ubuntu Studio for a second, since its a specifically packaged version of Ubuntu designed for multi-media professionals. It’s also supremely slickly packaged, in as so many words: It’s cool. There’s no reason Canonical could not roll out a specific hardware, setup, and support platform just targeted to multimedia professionals. And really, with some forethought and development, there’s no reason they could also not create any number of slightly differently packaged versions of Ubuntu offering an end-to-end business solution for any particular market segment.
They can in fact, offer the whole banana, and nothing more than is necessary. To give you an idea, imagine the following: Ubuntu Kiosk, Ubuntu Finance, Ubuntu Hotels, Ubuntu CRM. In fact, this may be a much more profitable course of them to take rather than solely focusing on the traditional linux server market, and would allow them to penetrate much deeper into business markets than solely offering blanket “Enterprise” solutions.
To give you an idea, I’ll use something of my own experience. I work currently as a Hotelier, and not only is there essentially no open source in hotels, much of the software in general is actually quite abysmal (Fidelio Express comes to mind in particular). This especially applies to the software which is available to small-chain or non-chain hotels. The larger hotels use PMS (Property Management Systems) which are developed in house. Hyatt actually is using a 20 year old Unix terminal system (It’s actually quite good). If A company were to develop an end to end, open source, property management system (and custom back end paperwork templates and such in excel), they’d do very well at capturing a large segment of the market, and do well capturing lucrative support contracts as well. Even the large chains would likely probably like to drop supporting their in-house software (which is typically either ancient or new and buggy), and focus on running hotels.
Now getting back to Dell not selling to businesses yet, well, this is to be expected actually. Redhat and Suse both have a very solid business reputation on the server end, while Ubuntu is both a.) brand new, and b.) something of a risk for Dell. In fact it works out to both Canonical’s and Dell’s advantage to have the starting deployment be in consumer desktops only. Canonical can establish its distro as a consumer and user friendly (to the business world, not to the allready converted) OS, as opposed to the perception of other linux distros being for back end techs. Dell essentially takes no risks by testing out Ubuntu in this way, as there would be no business contracts its obligated to support. If I’m not mistaken, even their support offerings are essentially discounted support contracts to Canonical. It also doesn’t risk unnecessarily upsetting the two business partners it already has in the Linux market, and likewise does not overburden itself with too many distro offerings in the same market segments.
The point being, is this allows Ubuntu to gain mind-share in a way no Linux (or Unix, or BSD, etc.) OS ever has, as a solution for users, and because of that, they will be best positioned to pursue the course I have outlined above.
