New Update of Landscape Is Part of Ubuntu's Enterprise Push

With Ubuntu 12.04 positioned as a long-term support (LTS) release and through lots of new initiatives, including increased focus on the cloud, Canonical is aiming Ubuntu squarely at enterprises. This focus on businesses has been a long time in the making, and will be stepped up as Ubuntu 12.10 arrives. Now, Canonical has delivered a major update to its Landscape Ubuntu system management platform, and the move is targeted directly at enterprises.

Landscpe is aimed at automating system management in enterprises, solving hardware management problems, helping to craft useful software repositories and more. You can watch videos about it and read more about it here.  According to Canonical:

"Landscape can be used to manage desktop, server and cloud deployments, or subsets of those deployments that you define when you subscribe to Ubuntu Advantage...Thanks to an extensive, scriptable API, Landscape can be easily integrated with your current configuration management, monitoring and ticketing systems."

If Canonical can get enterprises to adopt Landscape and buy into its Ubuntu Advantage support offerings, it could craft an enterprise-centric business similar to Red Hat's. Red Hat has pioneered the art of providing world-class support for open source software used in enterprises.

PC World notes that Canonical has been ratcheting up its focus on Landscape and enterprise futures for Ubuntu.  For interested enterprises, Canonical has produced an ROI analysis that claims Landscape can bring on big cost savings. You can find it here.