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Now Shuttleworth, who used tens of millions of his own dollars to fund Canonical and made it his ambition to entrench Ubuntu Linux on desktops and servers is now launching a full-on assault to put it on your smartphone, your tablet and the computers that run your favorite cloud services via OpenStack.

Taking on the giants

It’s a gutsy bet. He’s basically taking on Google’s Chrome Browser, ChromeOS and Android OS. And then there’s iOS. Not a job for the faint of heart. In a recent interview with GigaOM,  Shuttleworth said a key Ubuntu advantage is that its basic code really does run everywhere from itty-bitty mobile devices to big iron. No Android-Chrome OS divide here.

“The core of Ubuntu that runs on the server is the same as on the phone and that’s a wonderful resonance,” Shuttleworth said. “We’ve done  pioneering work to put server Linux on ARM chips and the core of those ARM chips is the same for servers as it is for smartphones,”  Shuttleworth said.

Admittedly, it’s still early days for running ARM servers in a production environment — my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported that Baidu is doing it — for storage — but few others are. But the need for energy-sipping servers is not going away. And ARM servers address that demand.

As more cloud services get delivered via smartphones and tablets, all that “resonance” could come in handy. But timing may be a problem. Android and Apple iOS, which dominate that smartphone and tablet market now, will be hard to dislodge. If you believe Google Chairman Eric Schmidt — a biased observer — Android Android’s growth rate is, is on track to hit 1 billion downloads within the next 6 to 9 months. And, to further complicate matters, Microsoft seems willing to spend big to build its presence in smartphones and tablets as well. As much money as Shuttleworth has, Microsoft has more.

Seemingly undaunted, Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is getting serious looks from silicon providers, from carriers and from handset makers who are interested in offering it on their devices. He declined to provide names. It is true that Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile assets still worries third-party handset makers who don’t relish the thought of competing with their OS provider, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed Android adoption.

Ubuntu shows strength in cloud

Ubuntu is already a big presence in the cloud by virtue of Amazon Web Services where it is the most popular operating environment on EC2 — at least as measured by the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that people create. “The number of AMIs running Ubuntu is 5 or 6 times as many as Windows or any other operating system,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with Redmonk. One caveat is that people create lots of AMIs that they may not actually use, cautioned The 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks.

And Ubuntu came earlier than many other vendors to the OpenStack party. It’s got a leg up in the enterprise two years ago when  HP named it the lead host and guest OS in HP’s OpenStack cloud. That relationship continues to this day.

Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu’s OpenStack gets tons of interest from telcos and carriers that are rushing to create their own cloud services to better compete with AWS. One theme coming out of the OpenStack Summit last month was that these sleeping giants, many of which offer VMware vCloud Director options that price them out of the market, are finally waking up to the threat that AWS poses to them. And that is something Shuttleworth feels Ubuntu, with Canonical behind it,  can capitalize on.

“We are in a very good position when carriers want to look beyond standing up OpenStack to what the end-user experience is,” he said.

In his view, Ubuntu more than other Linux OpenStack flavors, offers simplicity and power — a claim that other OpenStack players would likely dispute. Linux rivals Red Hat, SUSE and are also all in the mix here. And Nebula’s selling point is its OpenStack controller that makes it easy to plug OpenStack into existing legacy environments. There will be a ton of competition among the OpenStack providers even as they all contend with CloudStack and Eucalyptus options.

Shuttleworth maintains Ubuntu’s advantage, however.

“We really are at the point where you can take a USB with Ubuntu, stick it on 1 to 300 servers and in a short period have a high-availability cloud — compute, storage, and network — up and running that provides a lot of value,” he said. “This is real and it’s helping people get over the conceptual hurdle of moving to cloud. It’s at the point where you can have ten people debating it for a week or you can just go and do it — the cost is low enough and the lessons are valuable enough to make it happen.”

But what about revenue?

There’s one not-so-small hitch here. As many good reviews as Ubuntu Linux has gotten, the revenue or profit picture is about as clear as mud. Canonical’s business model is that customers pay for support and maintenance on free software. But the privately held company won’t say how many people actually pay for any of that. And it doesn’t talk about how much money Shuttleworth has ponied up since founding the company in 2004. The question is whether Canonical (and Ubuntu) could stand on its own without his deep pockets. Face it, it’s hard to take a customer from free to non-free.

When it comes to questions about revenue or profitability, Canonical will only say that customers including PC, phone and tablet manufacturers and big companies that deploy Ubuntu at scale  use Canonical’s paid tools and services to support their server, cloud and client environments.

That may not be enough detail for enterprise buyers who want to know if the vendor they use today will be around next year or the year after. For a company that has such grand plans for a free operating system, Canonical needs to address these questions at some point.

Shuttleworth will be talking about his grand cloud vision at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in London in September, so here’s your chance to ask.

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New features

First off, the default installation is for a virtualized environment. As Mark Baker, Ubuntu Server product manager at sponsor company Canonical, told me, this is because users are increasingly deploying the OS on hypervisors and Canonical wants to show off the OS’s capabilities there.

“While KVM has been big on Ubuntu since 2008, it’s not the only game in town,” Baker said. “We’re seeing customers wanting to understand integration or compatibility between ESX and Ubuntu, or even Hyper-V and Ubuntu, and we’re ensuring testing on these – and of course KVM and Xen — so when we are engaged with customers or users we can say we know Ubuntu provides a robust experience on the prevalent hypervisors.”

The other major aspect of this release is its integration with the new Grizzly release of OpenStack. Canonical has been involved with OpenStack since the start, and the release cycles for the two products are aligned (Grizzly came out a few weeks ago).

Ubuntu 13.04′s Juju orchestration “charms” have been updated to deploy OpenStack for high availability – for example, when the user deploys MySQL, the charm will set up 3 nodes in a failover configuration, and a similar approach applies to the deployment of the Rabbit messaging server. Of course, those deploying in a test environment won’t be too keen on running 2 or 3 of everything, so it will still be possible to install in a “less highly available way”, as Baker put it. The Juju GUI has also seen a lot of work this cycle “to improve usability”, he added.

Meanwhile, the Ceph storage subsystem is now fully integrated with Ubuntu and OpenStack, in order to please Canonical’s telco and service provider clients, and Ubuntu’s Floodlight OpenFlow controller has also been updated. Although Canonical and VMware are working closely on Nicira, “having an open-source alternative to Nicira is also important,” Baker pointed out.

Carrier adoption

Speaking of carriers and service providers, this is the market segment where Canonical appears to be thriving.

“OpenStack certainly has been the biggest growth areas for us in the last 12 months,” Baker said. “We have got engaged with the types of customers that we could only have dreamed of, looking back a few years. OpenStack is gaining adoption with carriers, and most people doing that to scale are doing that with OpenStack on Ubuntu. Most of the major telcos, the global names that you’ll see, are deploying their OpenStack on Ubuntu.”

Baker also claimed that OpenStack is seeing traction in the big data space, with users deploying Hadoop and Cassandra on Ubuntu – he suggested this may be out of “developer affinity” with the Linux distro.

“It’s fair to say the bread and butter of our user base is running web infrastructure,” Baker said. “A lot of that user base is moving that web infrastructure into the cloud. We’ve gained significant popularity on Azure – there is a fair proportion of that running Linux. While you wouldn’t think it a natural fit to provide Ubuntu on a Microsoft cloud, we actually think it’s quite exciting.”

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Yes, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux has run on tablets before, but the upcoming version is the first to be engineered specifically with touch in mind. The idea is to have one code base running across all screens (more on that later), and a developer preview will come out on Thursday that can be installed not only on Google’s Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, but also on the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus handsets.

We’ve already seen what the mobile version will look like, and now we know how it will look on tablets. In that form factor, it’s got several features worth mentioning, including voice-control for the heads-up display (HUD), multiple user accounts with full encryption, and the ability to multitask tablet and phone apps at the same time and on the same screen. The tablet can also be used as a thin client in the same way as an Ubuntu desktop can.

Here’s what Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth had to say in a statement, and a video too:

“Multi-tasking productivity meets elegance and rigorous security in our tablet experience… Our family of interfaces now scales across all screens, so your phone can provide tablet, PC and TV experiences when you dock it. That’s unique to Ubuntu and it’s the future of personal computing.”

Unified code

Now, about that single code base. Over the weekend, KDE developer Aaron Seigo launched what was by open-source standards a broadside against Canonical, accusing the London-based firm of “duping” developers by claiming to be using the same code for all versions, but not doing so in practice.

Canonical responded yesterday by insisting the code really would be one-size-fits-all when it’s complete. It went on to say this would hopefully happen by the end of this year, and that the first public release of “the full unified code base” would be in Ubuntu 14.04, in April 2014.

In other words, what you can install on your Nexus this week is far away from being being the finished product.

Enterprise focus

This is partly a consumer play, hence the TV iteration. However, the features Canonical mentioned today should appeal to enterprises, some of which are running Ubuntu on the server and, in the case of a few, on the desktop too.

In general, businesses currently use Microsoft on the desktop, with Apple’s iPad serving as the tablet of choice. If — and it’s a big if — Canonical can find manufacturers to actually make Ubuntu phones and tablets, the idea of developing once across all these form factors will be extremely attractive, particularly with a big question mark hanging over Windows 8′s place in the enterprise.

Of course, by spring 2014 there’s a good chance that Microsoft will have released an obligatory service pack (or ‘Blue’ release, or whatever it will be called) that clears up the OS’s various quirks, effectively giving corporate customers the all-clear to dive in. And it’s quite possible that Windows 8 will also prove to be the consumer success that Microsoft hopes it will be.

But if Windows 8′s enterprise appeal turns out to be more Vista than XP, business customers won’t have many familiar options to fall back on, leaving Canonical in a good position.

A lot can happen in a year.

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Ceph is an open-source storage subsystem that proponents say is more adaptable and less expensive than proprietary storage systems. Probably more to the point, it is also a competitor or alternative to the Swift storage system that is part of the OpenStack cloud platform. Ceph claims API compatibility with both Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files.

Shuttleworth’s Inktank investment comes in the form of a convertible bond that will be used to fund growth of InkTank and the Ceph community around it. Inktank itself was spun out of DreamHost, a large hosting company,  last year as a sort of system integrator or consultant to help companies deploy Ceph. Inktank’s founder and CEO, Sage Weil, co-founded DreamHost. Last week, Los Angeles–based DreamHost announced its version of Ceph and (spoiler alert) Canonical talked up its integration of Ceph into its OpenStack implementation at the Linux Foundation’s CloudOpen conference last month.

In a recent interview, DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson likened Inktank’s model to Canonical’s. ”We spun Inktank out to help companies that compete with DreamHost use Ceph for all their storage needs. The beauty of Ceph is it enables cheaper storage than S3. The starting point for [DreamHost DreamObjects' Ceph implementation] is 7 cents per gig — that’s quite a bit lower than Amazon object storage, which starts at 12 cents per gig,” he told me.

As more open source computing cloud options come into production from the OpenStack community, from CloudStack — which is now working with Basho to integrate Riak CS as a storage option – and from Eucalyptus, the landscape is getting more complicated and diverse. And then there’s always Amazon. It ain’t going anywhere.

Photo courtesy of markshuttleworth.com 

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With the funding secured, one of the first orders of business is to expand the private beta which launched in March in select — and unnamed — biotech and financial services companies, Kemp said in an interview.

“We provide a device that they can plug their services into and, boom, they’re going,” he said. Some of the other OpenStack clouds — such as those from Red Hat or Canonical — he said, will be more suited to hard-core techies that want to customize their clouds. Indeed, OpenStack clouds are starting proliferate with Rackspace, Internap, Hewlett-Packard , Piston Cloud (see disclosure), SUSE and other companies all fielding their own implementations.

Nebula, now with just under 60 employees, is in hiring mode, seeking system level engineers, product managers and others. “We’ve never really stopped recruiting,” Kemp said. Indeed. Just a few weeks ago, Nebula landed 7 developers from Rackspace, a fellow OpenStack collaborator and, to some degree, competitor.

Nebula will also move into a new Mountain View, Calif., facility since it’s bursting out of its current Palo Alto headquarters in the former Facebook office, Kemp said.

Comcast Ventures managing director Louis Toth said Nebula is particularly intriguing because of its management team — Kemp was formerly CTO of NASA and is one of the principal OpenStack architects — and its cloud deployment model. “The great thing about the Nebula Controller is you can take it and off-the-shelf white boxes and in a relatively short time set up a cloud and create hosted services for your user base,” he said. That’s an attractive model for both enterprises and small and medium businesses without a lot of IT resources.

Nebula, however, is coy about its total funding — it never disclosed how much it raised in its Series A round in July 2011.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The theory behind the idea is simple. When using the phone for typical handset functions, it works like any other Android phone. But place that phone in a dock that’s connected to a monitor and keyboard, and the phone powers an Ubuntu PC. The interface and features would be identical to a full desktop computer that has the Ubuntu operating system installed on it. Even better is the data access between the two platforms, says Canonical:

All data and services are shared between the Ubuntu and Android environments, which run simultaneously on the device. So Android applications such as contacts, telephony and SMS/MMS messaging are accessible from the Ubuntu interface. Indeed, all data on the smartphone can be accessed at any time, docked or not.

As I noted, this idea isn’t new. Most recently, Motorola attempted to implement it a year ago with its Atrix 4G smartphone and lapdock hardware. But the theory was better than the implementation, based on my usage. As a “laptop,” the system was sluggish and very limited: only web applications could be installed in Motorola’s customized version of Linux. I haven’t seen any mention of installable apps for Canonical’s solution, but there are a number of useful pre-installed apps.

Another key here is that Canonical has more experience that most with Linux implementations as Ubuntu is arguably the most-used Linux distro. That means it will likely have answers to any problems that Motorola faced with its attempt.

And the timing of this move is right for Canonical. I’ve been wondering if we really need the quad-core chips that are coming soon to smartphones — for phone activities and apps, I’m not sold. But phones that become traditional desktops have the potential to benefit from the extra processing power.

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ZDNet scored an interview with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, who discussed plans for mobile Ubuntu ahead of Canonical’s developer conference this week. The timing is uncertain, as it doesn’t appear that Canonical has even started the project, but Shuttleworth said the company is seeing the same trends that all of us are: the world is embracing mobile devices built around touch-screen user interfaces.

Linux on the desktop PC remains a bit of a joke despite years of promises that it could supplant Windows and Mac OS as a true alternative. But the mobile world is certainly different, with Google’s Android using Linux code at its heart to help it become the world’s most widely used mobile operating system in just a few short years.

It’s not clear what Canonical and Ubuntu would bring to the table in a crowded mobile world. Already this year we’ve seen HP all but throw in the towel on WebOS development, paring the number of viable mobile operating systems from five to four. Still, only two are truly relevant, as RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) is moving as quickly as possible to embrace the QNX operating system across its flagship BlackBerry devices and Windows Phone struggles to find converts. And we’re already starting to see signs of “app fatigue” inside even big companies fed up with supporting multiple mobile environments.

There’s a school of thought, however, that if the mobile Web lives up to its promise that the underlying operating system becomes less important: apps will run on any mobile device in the browser. There’s another school of thought (articulated by Shuttleworth in the article) that current Android hardware partners are looking for another mobile operating system in the wake of Google’s decision to purchase Motorola. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Windows Phone were expected to win much of that business, should things come to that end, but another Linux-based mobile OS that perhaps offered as much customization as Android could be appealing.

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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit on Monday, Canonical will start talking up Ubuntu as a viable option for phones or tablets of the future, said Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

This is no mean feat. Ubuntu Linux has its share of supporters, but as a server OS it lags behind Red Hat Linux in corporate adoption. And the mobile OS market is already dominated by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, with Microsoft making a late play with Windows Phone 7. There are already casualties: Blackberry, once a formidable contender, is fading, and it looks like HP’s webOS adventure will be shelved. One camp thinks that’s more than enough mobile operating systems. Another holds that there is always room for a new, creative player in a booming market.

Count Shuttleworth, who backs Ubuntu with his own money, in the second group. He readily acknowledged that Apple is a formidable incumbent but also maintained that Google’s pending acquisition of Motorola will shake things up. Handset makers that now use Android will have to contend with a Google-owned handset maker.

“The Google-Motorola deal changes everything,” Shuttleworth said while acknowledging the tough road ahead. “The notion that [the mobile OS status quo] is a done deal has some merit and we don’t have a mobile product today but the level of interest is high . . . and there is an underlying hunger both in the industry at large and in the open-source, free software world for leadership in this regard,” he said.

“We will embrace phones and tablets and also smart screens — whether they’re smart TVs or monitors or other touch devices. That’s a fairly radically broadened scope for the work we do with Ubuntu now,” Shuttleworth said in an interview in advance of the event.

The smartphone push will build on early work Canonical has done with its Unity interface for netbooks, touch-operated devices or small-form-factor devices, he noted.

Shuttleworth said that Canonical wants to engage developers in a discussion around this new target market at the summit, but there won’t be a lot of specifics around timing and road map. “This is just the start of the conversation,” he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user paixetprosperite

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