DEVOPSdigest

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced the launch of its enhanced Global System Integrator (GSI) Programme.

Alongside new partnership benefits, it includes resell and integration opportunities for the entirety of Canonical’s secure, open source portfolio for the data centre, multi-cloud, edge and IoT. GSIs can now drive increased revenue by building customer solutions on an automated and scalable platform that accelerates time to market, decreases customer OPEX and delivers IT modernisation to their enterprise clients.

“GSIs are at the forefront of bringing digital transformation to the enterprise in the form of best-fit solutions around AI, multi-cloud, high performance computing (HPC), IoT and intelligent automation. Our re-designed program helps them to deliver this to customers quickly, securely and with better economics over a deployment’s lifetime,” said Regis Paquette, VP of Alliances at Canonical. “GSIs increasingly need to recommend, incorporate and deliver open source technologies to build bespoke solutions for enterprises while addressing their complex IT requirements. With this GSI program, Canonical makes that process easy for them.”

The modular nature of Canonical’s portfolio provides GSIs consulting and integration options with the freedom to work across multiple IT environments, workloads, vendors and legacy infrastructure. GSIs can achieve reduced IT delivery times by accelerating deployments that normally take months down to just hours.

Deployment complexity is simplified through Canonical’s tools from bare metal to the application layer. This includes DevOps automation of apps and infrastructure, cloud style provisioning of physical servers and apps that can be built, published and updated remotely without the need for manual intervention. With such tooling, GSIs can focus on configuration reuse, develop their organizational knowledge and thus, increase customer satisfaction through quality deployments and improved day-2 operations.

Canonical is rolling out additional benefits as part of the program. GSIs can take advantage of competitive pricing discounts upon deal registration and aggregated volume discounts across their combined customer base. Technical teams can be certified both for first level support and delivery of all Canonical services. Canonical will also assign dedicated resources to GSIs including account management, sales, engineering and marketing support, in addition to a comprehensive partner portal.

As part of the program, Canonical will engage with GSIs to train their sales and consulting teams on the value of Canonical’s full suite, identify integration opportunities with the GSIs own offering and work together on specific customer requests such as strategic proof of concepts.

Partnering with Canonical can drive GSIs’ businesses across all enterprise IT initiatives. With Ubuntu as the number one guest operating system on all major public clouds and Canonical a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation, it is ideally suited for multi-cloud deployments. Charmed OpenStack offers cost-efficient private cloud infrastructure with reduced day-2 operational costs. In addition, Ubuntu is the reference platform for Kubernetes on all major public clouds, and delivers pure upstream Charmed Kubernetes for the delivery of highly portable containerized workloads for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure enterprise-grade support provides up to ten years of security updates, packaged in a holistic pricing model.