While i was in Montreal recently, I took the opportunity to pay a visit to Canonical's office as I wanted to increase my knowledge of the business offerings which are available to Enterprise customers who choose the Ubuntu OS.

I started my IT career when Novell was the dominant name in the enterprise space and it is good to see other options emerging that complement & support choice in desktop operating systems.

With large scale Open Source deployments or migrations, the decision makers want reassurance that they will have solid support options available to their IT team.  For average users, turning to community forums and Google may work, but mission critical situations need a SLA.  

There is a need for local support expertise and an opportunity exists for mid sized LInux based companies to create business opportunities by offering service agreements to their clients.

However, to be able to leverage a reasonable support option such as Ubuntu Advantage allows me to offer a complete solution to potential clients such as Government Ministries.  So often the initial comments about an Open Source alternative is "If its free, how can it be any good?" These administrators are accustomed to budgeting for support and would rather have a per seat contract then face an outcry over the decision to adopt a new platform.

An Ubuntu Advantage subscription offers the following services:

Landscape - a systems management and monitoring service which allows you to manage multiple Ubuntu machines

Custom Support  - the Global Support & Services team provides support for installation, applications and system administration.

Assurance - protects businesses against legal claims for Intellectual Property (IP) infringement arising from the use of Ubuntu

Knowledge Base - technical articles for best practices that help with faster resolution of common issues

There is both a desktop & a server offering of Ubuntu Advantage.

On a final note, though there has been much discussion of late about the perceived contributions of various Linux communities, I can honestly say from a working perspective, that there are advantages to brand recognition.  When I hear from clients that they have been able to purchase a system pre-installed with Ubuntu in Pakistan or Ecuador, that removes one more barrier to adoption for me.

Here are some interesting comments on "tribalism" as relating to distro's of choice.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/439