UPDATED 10:00 EDT / MARCH 26 2015

Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth Live in theCUBE NEWS

Here’s how Canonical plans to become a force in network virtualization

Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth Live in theCUBECanonical Ltd. is moving into network virtualization through a broad alliance with Ericsson aimed at extending the reach of its popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. The move is the latest milestone in a multi-pronged strategic expansion that has ramped up considerably over recent months.

The ambitious push most recently took Canonical into the connected universe with the addition of a new updating mechanism to its embedded Ubuntu flavor promising to simplify the implementation of changes across devices. The feature doubles as an integration point with a different version of the platform launched shortly before to target cloud environments, which are the focus of the new partnership.

Canonical and Ericsson will align engineering and go-to-market efforts around their common goals on that front as part of an extensive collaboration set to span three years. Most significantly, the alliance will see the networking giant incorporate Ubuntu into the foundations of its Cloud System, a suite of technologies designed to help carriers and other large organizations run their infrastructure.

The platform is built upon OPNFV, an initiative that Ericsson launched with a number of other big-name data center suppliers in October to establish an industry standard for network functions virtualization (NFV) implementations. The project is based on OpenStack and closely connected to the upstream ecosystem for the platform, which is one of Canonical’s most important strongholds.

More than half of the workloads running on the fast-growing cloud system leverage Ubuntu, according to the firm, a number that jumps to 70 percent in off-premise deployments. Providing support for Ubuntu thus makes Ericsson’s software, which is based on OpenStack, that much more appealing to organizations that are looking at OPNFV to modernize their networks.

Canonical, meanwhile, gets to tap into the sales channel of one of the world’s biggest network equipment suppliers. The alliance is poised to significantly boost the adoption of Ubuntu in the lucrative telecommunications sector, especially as more integrations are added over the course of the collaboration.

And once its foot is in the door, the Linux distributor should have a much easier time targeting carriers with the embedded version of the operating system. Seeing that updates such as new Android versions can currently take months to roll out, the built-in patching mechanism is a major selling point.


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