January 22, 2010 at 09:35Canonical Offers Official Lotus Symphony Support
For some reason, information that seems rather indicative passed unnoticed - Canonical launched the IBM Symphony support program on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition . This program is focused on corporate implementations, the price for an infrastructure of a thousand jobs will be $ 5.5 per user per month.
The trend is clear: Canonical, which began very briskly by conquering private users through free distribution distributions, is now clearly targeting the corporate market. Support issues, and especially support for FOSS-based solutions, inevitably arise in any, even small, implementation. And customers are not too happy when the implementers tell them about the joys of the community - it would be easier for them to pick up the phone and ask the specific person to whom the money was paid. And it’s no secret that when migrating to the same schools on Linux, for example, the main questions arise precisely regarding the work of desktop applications.
From the point of view of business implementations, a bunch with IBM in this case is a win-win option - a powerful brand that you don’t have to explain to even those far from IT managers, and without any costs for the Symphony software itself. In principle, Canonical does not hide that it targets Microsoft’s SMB clearing and will try to lure customers considering the cost of upgrading to Windows 7. Naturally, IBM’s free office suite with official support makes this offer more significant for corporate leaders.
It seems to me that this is generally an interesting turn in the market for FOSS desktop solutions - Novell and Red Hat are still more focused on server systems, Russian developers like ALT Linux have no such resources as western vendors, so Linux has been mastered on desktops for many years going much slower than we would like. And Canonical is just strong in desktop systems, and it seems to have no problems with money, so it may be able to speed it up.
As far as I understand, there are no details yet, but judging by the fact that the Canonical affiliate program has stepped up over the last six months or a year (and this is also evidence of their reorientation to the B2B market), specifics will soon be published. For example, I wonder what the price of support for projects will be less than a thousand installations and how they will authorize partners - it is quite possible that a business niche of Russian-language support will appear.
The trend is clear: Canonical, which began very briskly by conquering private users through free distribution distributions, is now clearly targeting the corporate market. Support issues, and especially support for FOSS-based solutions, inevitably arise in any, even small, implementation. And customers are not too happy when the implementers tell them about the joys of the community - it would be easier for them to pick up the phone and ask the specific person to whom the money was paid. And it’s no secret that when migrating to the same schools on Linux, for example, the main questions arise precisely regarding the work of desktop applications.
From the point of view of business implementations, a bunch with IBM in this case is a win-win option - a powerful brand that you don’t have to explain to even those far from IT managers, and without any costs for the Symphony software itself. In principle, Canonical does not hide that it targets Microsoft’s SMB clearing and will try to lure customers considering the cost of upgrading to Windows 7. Naturally, IBM’s free office suite with official support makes this offer more significant for corporate leaders.
It seems to me that this is generally an interesting turn in the market for FOSS desktop solutions - Novell and Red Hat are still more focused on server systems, Russian developers like ALT Linux have no such resources as western vendors, so Linux has been mastered on desktops for many years going much slower than we would like. And Canonical is just strong in desktop systems, and it seems to have no problems with money, so it may be able to speed it up.
As far as I understand, there are no details yet, but judging by the fact that the Canonical affiliate program has stepped up over the last six months or a year (and this is also evidence of their reorientation to the B2B market), specifics will soon be published. For example, I wonder what the price of support for projects will be less than a thousand installations and how they will authorize partners - it is quite possible that a business niche of Russian-language support will appear.