A Day At The Canonical Enterprise Summit

Running alongside the bi-annual Ubuntu Developer Summit in Denmark this autumn, Canonical organised a one day Enterprise Summit. Set in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, the information packed day was advertised to decision makers and senior technologists within companies of all sizes.  A show of hands during the day suggested that it was largely attended by senior technical staff, with a few of Canonical's international partners (like ourselves) there as well.  Whilst naturally a good proportion were local, people had travelled from all over the world to attend.

There were many sessions during the day with a range of interesting and influential speakers, from founder Mark Shuttleworth and CEO Jane Silber, to customers using Ubuntu in critical production environments. The three features that were concentrated on during the day were scalable computing, secure delivery of applications to devices and the maturity of Ubuntu as a package.

Key references were provided as examples that Ubuntu and Canonical have reached new levels of maturity. First and of most obvious significance is a reminder that Google relies on Canoncical for technical support.  A few of their large customers were also present to demonstrate innovative uses of Ubuntu.

Cap Gemini presented Ubuntu on the desktop, introduced by one of the team of four who provide IT support to over 1000 accountants and senior accountants.  Their users each have a netbook with a minimal, locked down installation of Ubuntu.  All data access and application delivery comes from the cloud, with Ubuntu's seamless thin client integration.

Canonical's primary focus for the day and of particular interest to me was scalable computing, built around OpenStack and Juju.  This impressive combination allow companies to start small with a combination of private servers and public cloud instances, and then rapidly scale up or down to match demand.  Mercado Libre, billed as the eBay of Latin America, introduced their deployment of these technologies on a private cloud with 1000 physical nodes running over 7000 virtuals.

Other seminars included presentations on MongoDB, a live installation of OpenStack, HP demonstrating their 1680 core 2U hyperscale server, and a report on the state of IT by analyst IDC.

If you wish to talk about implementing Ubuntu or learn more about what is on offer, then give us a call!