Ubuntu Smartphone Shipping in October - The CIO Report - WSJ

Smartphones running the open source Ubuntu operating system will be available to customers beginning in October 2013, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd. Canonical provides services for corporate customers using Ubuntu open source software. Application developers will have access to the smaartphone operating system, which is optimized for the Galaxy Nexus handset manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co. , in late February.

Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system used to run servers and other infrastructure in many corporate IT departments, will be available on a full range of devices, including desktop and tablet computers, potentially providing corporate IT executives a way to reduce the number of devices they purchase and manage. The smartphones can be docked to larger displays, wirelessly connected to keyboards and other peripherals, and have Windows-based applications streamed to them from corporate servers. This would mean users could access all manner of corporate data through a single, pocket-sized device. “You can share Windows apps to the phone desktop,” said Mr. Shuttleworth during a meeting in New York Tuesday. Other operating systems running on smartphones, such as Microsoft Corp. ’s Windows Apple Inc. ’s iOS and Google’s Android, are at least slightly different versions of the same operating systems running tablets or PCs, and those differences often mean the same data can’t run on all three form factors.

Other hardware and application vendors, including General Dynamics Corp. and Citrix Systems Inc. , are developing handsets that can provide uncompromised access to corporate data, but have yet to make a significant dent in the market.

But despite its popularity among open source developers, Ubuntu, too, faces significant challenges in penetrating the business smartphone market; one is that many companies now allow employees to use their own smartphones and tablets for work – a trend known as “bring your own device” – and have already adapted to the overwhelming popularity of iOS and Android devices; another is that device choices are largely driven by the number of applications available to users, of which there are very few currently for Ubuntu.

While switching to an all-Ubuntu-based environment wouldn’t make sense for many organizations, it could appeal to companies which employ large numbers of Linux developers. Those companies include companies running large-scale Web-based businesses, and run the gamut from financial services firms to consumer shopping, streaming media and social networking sites. For heavily regulated industries, and “very security-conscious organizations, and where IT still have control over which devices people bring to work, Ubuntu is definitely an option,” says Chris Hazelton, a mobile analyst with business advisory firm The 451 Group LLC.

But despite its attractiveness to corporate IT, “the real challenge is overcoming this very large BYOD phenomenon,” said Mr. Hazelton. Another may be that many IT organizations have already adapted to an imperfect world, and support a variety of operating systems – even for developer environments where applications need to be written and tested for different operating systems. “It seems overly complicated to me,” noted Carolina Milanesi, a mobile analyst for Gartner Inc.

Mr. Shuttleworth said the new phone operating system will be available in two large geographic markets in October, and while he didn’t commit to North America being one of those, he said North America is “absolutely a key market for Ubuntu.” He said the operating system has drawn interest from carriers as well, many of which are eager to break up the smartphone market hegemony of Apple and Google. Mr. Shuttleworth declined to identify carrier or handset partners.