One of two articles contrasting the strategies Canonical Ltd. and Microsoft are using to seed their respective operating systems across every platform ranging from phone to supercomputer. Read Mike Wheatley’s profile of Microsoft’s strategy here.

If you think Microsoft’s much-touted “Windows Everywhere” strategy is aggressive, a closer look at what Canonical Ltd. has been doing to promote its own operating system is in order. The Linux distributor is executing a multi-pronged push into the enterprise extending from the data center all the way to the new categories of connected devices emerging at the edge.

Serving as the launchpad for the offensive is the dominant presence of Linux in practically every part of the corporate networks outside personal computers, including servers, most of the related infrastructure and even employee-owned devices since the rise of Android. Canonical’s Ubuntu only accounts for a fraction of that installed base, but boasts sufficient adoption – and just as importantly, in the right places – for the company to mount an assault on the leaders.

A combination of unrestricted licensing and ease-of-use has made the distribution the top Linux flavor on Amazon Web Services and many of the other leading infrastructure-as-a-service platforms, as well as in the private cloud among organizations deploying OpenStack. And Ubuntu also ranks as the most downloaded operating system by a wide margin in the Docker Hub Registry, the go-to software marketplace for containers.

The lightweight virtualization format is emerging as the missing link to combining the two components of the cloud equation into a hybrid whole, and, accordingly, provides the glue that holds Canonical’s ambitious strategy for enterprise dominion together. Like Microsoft, the company is banking on the interoperability of the technology to help organizations exploit the benefits of using a common operating system across the different parts of the corporate network.

But whereas Redmond is still several quarters away from completing its vision, the Linux distributor already has all the pieces in place. Canonical introduced a slimmed-down version of Ubuntu designed to support containerized workloads last year and followed up a few months later with the introduction of an even more lightweight variation adapted for powering connected devices.

The two flavors share a common container-based updating mechanism that allows organizations to roll out changes from their Ubuntu-powered development servers to their Ubuntu-powered end-points without the normal hassle involved in pushing new code to production. With Microsoft so far focusing its efforts around the virtualization technology mainly on the server side of the equation, that multiplier effect puts Canonical in the best position among operating system vendors to provide a comprehensive value proposition encompassing the full range of applications and devices in the enterprise.

But of course, having all the pieces is only the first part of putting together the puzzle. Canonical faces a tough challenge in assembling the different flavors of Ubuntu into a cohesive value proposition. The biggest obstacle is not interoperability, or even the lack of a solid vision for that matter – it’s adoption.

In particular, the embedded implementation of Ubuntu – the main component setting the company’s strategy apart from that of Microsoft and fellow Linux distributors also eyeing the hybrid cloud, such as Red Hat, Inc. – is fairly unproven compared to some of the better-established alternatives. Canonical hopes that the increasingly widespread use of its platform in the back-end will provide an on-ramp to adoption at the edge and thus help level the playing field, but that will take time that the competition is bound to exploit.

The big question, then, is how much can the company make out of its head start before the rest of the industry catches up. Canonical doesn’t have nearly as many resources as Microsoft, but it does have the weight of the open-source ecosystem behind its back, which has gotten the better of the proprietary world on more than one occasion before. One must only look back to Linux to see that.

Read Mike Wheatley’s profile of Microsoft’s strategy here.
Image by Alvimann via MorgueFile