blog

15 July 2010

Ubuntu in Business

by Anton Piatek

On Tuesday I attended the Ubuntu in Business event run by the Ubuntu UK Community and Canonical, and unlike Proactive Paul I really enjoyed the day and thought it was a success.

I will agree and say that there should have been more introductory talks on Ubuntu and Open Source for those people that were not familiar, especially as they were trying to target new and potential users, however given half the audience was already running Ubuntu I am not sure if that would have been a waste. Certainly introduction demo’s are always good and especially for someone new to Ubuntu or Linux this would show that really it is not very different from using windows and is certainly not scary!

The talks and targetted demo’s were good, in particular I was curious about the Ubuntu Cloud and Landscape which both seem really good. For me the best part of the day was when the guest speakers and Canonical hosts got up on a panel and were interviewed by Glyn Moody which resulted in some fantastic discussion, excellent answers and some good questions and responses from the audience.

Of course the ubuntini cocktail afterwards was interesting too – not really my thing, but was nice to try.

The conversation after the cocktail was possibly the best part of the evening – actually getting to talk to some of the Canonical folks and forging a few new links. Some good conversations about IBM and Ubuntu, hopefully it won’t take too long for sanity to break-out and IBM to consider Ubuntu seriously
(If you are a business buying IBM software and want to use it on Ubuntu, make sure you tell your salesman this – If IBM doesn’t hear people asking for software on Ubuntu then there is no reason to ship it for Ubuntu).

tags: conference - Linux - ubuntu