Canonical enterprise chief jumps for Eucalyptus cloud
Toe-tripping sales re-org in action
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Ubuntu-steward Canonical has lost the executive heading up its enterprise business to cloud-floater Eucalyptus Systems.
Paul Holt, Canonical's director of corporate services, has been named vice president of sales for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Eucalyptus.
Holt replaced former Canonical executive Neil Levine on corporate services, after Levine left Canonical in May also for a cloud start-up – cloud systems-data venture Nodeable.
Nodeable, whose service was just released as a beta and which describes itself as offering "Twitter for machines", just received $2m in series-A venture funding.
Levine had been vice president of corporate services at Canonical while Holt was director. Levine is now Nodeable vice president of product development.
Levine ran tools and delivered services to enterprise customers and was responsible for Canonical's server and cloud strategy while Holt built and led sales, channel and marketing for the Enterprise unit, according to their bios.
Also going from Canonical, meanwhile, is global sales engineering manager Boris Devouge. It is not clear yet where Devouge, whose exit has been announced internally, is headed.
The moves comes as Canonical merges its OEM and corporate sales teams. A Canonical spokesperson told The Reg there had been an overlap between the two.
The spokesperson told The Reg Canonical was "extremely grateful" for Holt's work. "When you hire talent there is always the risk that they are going to move on," the spokesperson said.
Of course, Holt is going to Eucalyptus just as Canonical has demoted its support for spinning up private clouds based on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) using Eucalyptus in the Ubuntu server core.
Instead, Canonical is prioritising OpenStack – a move that has paid an early dividend. Ubuntu has been named "lead host and guest operating system" on Hewlett-Packard's fledgling OpenStack-based cloud; HP, like Canonical, this year joined the OpenStack Project.
Canonical would not comment on Devouge's exit.
The spokesperson said Chris Kenyon, vice president of OEM services, had taken over sales "in what was a long-planned re-organisation" and promised there would be no disruption. Canonical is hiring pre-sales and direct sales people to the re-organised operation, the spokesperson said.
The two exits follow the May departures of both Levine and Ubuntu chief technology officer (CTO) Mark Zimmerman, a founding member of the company who had been on board since 2004. ®
COMMENTS
Maybe Ubuntu has lost it's shine
Having made a name for itself over the last 6 years or so, I think that people are beginning to realise that the corporate-customer-pay-for-support model that Canonical have been trying to work towards is a difficult one to build a business on.
The move towards the shiny has not helped, having polarized their advocates into those who don't understand the need to change, and those who love it. The former category, IMHO, is the one most likely to suggest Ubuntu in the server space, so in many ways the dis-Unity spat is indirectly doing more damage to their corporate support model than anything else they have done.
I'm sure that some people will remind me that Gnome is still in the repository and can be installed, and that server releases are different from workstation ones, but those people are missing the point about the work necessary to run server type systems.
To survive, Canonical has to approach profitability at some point, because Mark Shuttleworth won't bankroll them forever. If they are losing some of their high up managers, it appears to me that this thought may be occurring within the company as well.
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