Canonical's Shuttleworth Explains Ubuntu-Dell Cloud Pitch

In only five minutes and 30 seconds of video, Canonical Chairman Mark Shuttleworth lays out a ton of info on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, the company’s partnership with Dell, the importance of OpenStack, and the future of open source in the cloud. That video was an interview with Dell cloud evangelist Barton George, and is well worth watching.

Here are five key takeaways from Shuttleworth’s cloud remarks:

1. The major value proposition of the combined Dell/Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud solution, available from this week, is to give Dell’s network of cloud VARs an all-in-one, ready-to-deploy open source cloud platform that’s fully compatible with the de facto Amazon EC2 standard.

2. And speaking of Amazon EC2, Shuttleworth says that the open source cloud movement has been set back by the lack of a formal standards review process. But the fact that there are open source implementations that are compatible with the effectively closed platforms like Amazon is a major step in the right direction.

3. OpenStack is an important project because it aims to step up as an open source implementation of a standard set of APIs – in other words, it wants to do everything Amazon EC2 does, and then some, but with an open source heart.

4. By building all open source clouds  to be compatible with Amazon EC2, OpenStack, Ubuntu, and Rackspace are all slowly building a common ground for taking any workload and deploying it on the platform of choice.

5. Dell and Canonical are looking forward to working with Eucalyptus as well as OpenStack – both are serious open source players in the cloud with similar approaches to the concept of cloud computing, but Eucalyptus has a focus on the private cloud that OpenStack doesn’t. In fact, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is built on Eucalyptus’ tech.

Some final thoughts: Shuttleworth clearly believes in the power and importance of open source in the cloud.

Still, Canonical has faced its share of challenges over the past year. COO Matt Asay left the company in December 2010; Google Android and Apple iPad have largely stolen Ubuntu’s thunder on so-called Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs); and Google Chrome OS could emerge as an Ubuntu rival on netbook-type devices.

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