Ubuntu will hit the big time on Amazon: Here's how
Turning love for Linux into cold hard cash
Posted in Management, 11th May 2012 09:22 GMT
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Open ... and Shut The cloud is the new operating system, and Amazon owns the cloud. Big iron vendors like IBM and HP are feeling the heat as workloads itch to move off expensive mainframes into Amazon's public cloud. Even Microsoft, the once undisputed king of the operating system, is under siege as its Seattle neighbor embraces and extends .NET and SQL Server, making Amazon, not Microsoft, the one-stop shop for enterprise computing needs.
Given Amazon's appetite and momentum, it remains to be seen which of its business partners will benefit from its rise, and which will be swept aside as it incorporates more and more functionality into Amazon Web Services.
Canonical, primary sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, may fall into both camps.
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels notes that Amazon has had a profound effect on the startup community, offering robust infrastructure for a comparative pittance. Canonical, to a lesser degree, is much the same. Many of the startups I know use Ubuntu (on AWS) as their chosen cloud platform. Based on these data from a Cloud Market survey, it looks like they're not alone:
Indeed, while Red Hat dominates the data centre, every survey I've seen suggests that Ubuntu is still the dominant cloud OS, above RHEL, CentOS, and even Windows. This is the case for AWS, Rackspace, and other public cloud infrastructure. It's also true of the market for public websites where Ubuntu also surpasses Red Hat.
Red Hat cloud chief Scott Crenshaw, however, disputes the notion that Canonical's cloud lead is anything more than "fluff" based on cherry-picking "selective data":
When it comes to heavy lifting - building 'serious scale' clouds - spending hundreds of millions of dollars on proprietary software and making it open source, they [Canonical] are not anywhere in the same ballpark as Red Hat. When companies want an operating system platform they can rely on they come to Red Hat for a few reasons. The first is we've got first-class world wide support, the second is we actually write a lot of code unlike Canonical, so who better to fix or prevent problems... Of all the things that keep me awake at night, Canonical is not one of them.
Both Canonical and Red Hat may be right.
As the former chief operating officer at Canonical, I saw the company's revenue rise considerably, with a significant portion of that growth coming from growing enterprise adoption. But while I was there (2010), that uptake was coming from the data center, not the cloud. Cloud was still a nascent market: no one except Amazon was making any money there.
This may have changed, but my hunch is that the AWS crowd still treats Ubuntu like a free lunch - one that they're happy to "eat" in large quantities given its quality. HP's new public cloud, for example, is built in part on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is a first-class guest OS citizen. But Canonical will likely get paid $0.00 for every Ubuntu guest OS deployed.
The question, therefore, is how to turn all of this adoption into cash.
Amazon makes money by charging for utility-like compute services. Red Hat piggybacks on this by charging for certified versions of its popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux software. Canonical, however, has a longstanding commitment to not package Ubuntu in this way, which is both a blessing to adoption and a curse to monetisation.
As Amazon continues to consume a rising number of enterprise workloads, Canonical needs to figure out a way to march in lockstep. This almost certainly will require a modification of its current licensing and/or pricing model. Amazon likes to run an amazingly low-margin business, and any costs that it can shed it will. Ubuntu makes a great guest OS because it's free, which means more money can be spent on AWS. Were Canonical to demand a cut of the action for all its Ubuntu adoption, I'm positive the response would be: "Next in line... CentOS?"
In other words, Canonical can't rely on the good grace of Amazon, or anyone else. It needs to find a way to insist upon payment.
Fortuitously, the cloud is ready-made for open-source monetisation. Software offered as a service is easy to charge for. The trick is figuring out which services startups and enterprises need to get the most from their cloud-based Ubuntu deployments. Juju seems like a good start. But more than the current crop of offerings is needed to really sell into the enterprise.
In sum, Canonical has nailed one hard problem: adoption. The second hard problem - monetisation - is looming [Sun Microsystems faced a similar challenge on Java - ed], but Amazon actually provides both a threat and an answer: services. If Canonical can crack the code on appropriate services to complement Ubuntu cloud deployments, it will have a massive business on its hands. ®
Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Nodeable, offering systems management for managing and analysing cloud-based data. He was formerly SVP of biz dev at HTML5 start-up Strobe and chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfresco's general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). His column, Open...and Shut, appears three times a week on The Register.
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COMMENTS
Huh?
That graph has to be one of the most confusing pieces of 'research' going. Ubuntu is shown as top, but then the second line down is 'linux'. What linux? All the major linux distributions have their own lines. Is it a sum of those? But Ubuntu is linux too...
The original source site throws no light on the subject. There is also no explanation of how this data was derived.
You lost me at...
"Microsoft, the once undisputed king of the operating system." Who says stuff like that?
Re: Author can't understand anything but money
I think the point is that if your business model - and we are talking about business, in case you didn't notice - is built on developing something, employing highly paid developers to do it and then funded by giving your product away for free, it's not going to last very long.
Look at Premiership football - many teams are owned by zillionaires, they are excellent during the good times, but then the zillionaire decides that he's loosing too much money, so tries to make the club (at least partially) stand on its own two feet. The club then goes into administration. If Canonical doesn't generate money, Ubuntu will fail as a venture.
I guess one area would be certification/training
I think the more popular Ubuntu becomes on the server side the greater the demand for certification and training which Canonical could capitalise on. Also the more certified Ubuntumins out there, could help with more adoption so it would be a win win situation.
Re: Oh Yeah, Powered by One-Horns
Hmm... only 5/10 for this rather perfunctory effort.
Whilst you've managed to combine inaccuracy, irrelevance, paranoia and a meaningless acronym (SMOOOUC) into a single post adequately well there aren't nearly enough random and unnecessarily capitalised words to clearly convey the shouting. The result is that the corresponding mental images that should be induced in the mind of the reader, of you 'frothing at the mouth' and the resultant 'foam specked spittle running down your screen', are almost entirely absent.
In summary, you come across as being far too calm and composed, and don't really seem to be trying.
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