INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Canonical, the company best known for its Ubuntu Linux distribution, is on a path to an IPO
That something Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth has been quite open about
But don&t expect that IPO to happen this year.
&We did decide as a company — and that not just my decision — but we did decide that we
want to have a commercial focus,& Shuttleworth told me during an interview at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada today
&So we picked cloud and IoT as the areas to develop that
And being a public company, given that most of our customers are now global institutions, it makes for us also to be a global institution
I think it would be great for my team to be part of a public company
It would be a lot of work, but we are not shy of work.&
Unsurprisingly, Shuttleworth didn&t want to talk about the exact timeline for the
&We will do the right thing at the right time,& he said
That right time is not this year, though
&No, there is a process that you have to go through and that takes time
We know what we need to hit in terms of revenue and growth and we&re on track.&
Getting the company on track was very much Shuttleworth
focus over the course of the last year
That meant killing projects like the Ubuntu Phone (which Shuttleworth said was &painful,&) as well as the Unity desktop environment
Instead, the company focus is now squarely on helping enterprises stand up and manage their private clouds — no matter whether those run
OpenStack, Kubernetes or a combination of those.
That doesn&t mean Canonical has forgotten about the desktop, though
Shuttleworth told me that the desktop team still has the same size as before
He also noted that the desktop is still a passion for him.
&We took some big risks a year ago,& he said
&We cut a bunch of stuff that people loved about us
We had to see if people were going to respond commercially.& That move is paying off now, though
During a keynote earlier today, Shuttleworth noted that Canonical is now in talks for about 200 new deployments for 2018 — up from about
40 in 2017.
While the hype around OpenStack has died down considerably over the course of the last two years, Canonical is still seeing good
growth there — especially now that there are only a few major players left, including RedHat, which he name-checked a number of times
during both his keynote and our conversation.
Why are things going well for Canonical when others couldn&t make a business out of OpenStack
&I believe for this community — the OpenStack community — it really important to deliver on the underlying promise of more
cost-effective infrastructure,& he said
&You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be kumbaya and open source
In practice, to me, most of the stuff that we saw at OpenStack was bullshit
The stuff that really matters is computers, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks
So we ruthlessly focus on delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that.&
Today, Canonical can deliver an OpenStack
platform to an enterprise in two weeks — with all of the hardware and services in place
&I don&t mind being a bit controversial because we are delivering the promise of OpenStack,& he said
&The promise of OpenStack wasn&t delivering endless summits and endless new projects and endless new ideas.& That, he said, is exactly the
kind of bullshit he was referring to in his earlier comments.
Looking ahead, Shuttleworth noted that he especially interested in what
Canonical can do around IoT solutions, too
Thanks to Ubuntu Core and its Snap system, it has all the tools in place, including a lightweight management layer
The company also is focusing heavily on getting more customers in the financial services sector
No doubt, having a bunch of large banks and brokerages as reference customers will help the company when it comes to its IPO — and my
guess is that we can expect that one to happen next year.
