About

About Canonical

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project and the leading provider of support services for Ubuntu deployments in the enterprise.

Ubuntu is a free, open-source platform for client, server and cloud computing. Since its launch in 2004, it has become a natural choice for users of all kinds, from Fortune 500 companies to hardware makers, content providers, software developers and individual technologists.

With developers, support staff and engineering centres all over the world, Canonical is uniquely positioned to help its partners and enterprise customers make the most of Ubuntu. Canonical is a privately held company.

Fast facts

Canonical

  • Canonical was founded in 2004. The first version of Ubuntu was launched that same year, and today it powers millions of PCs all around the world.
  • Canonical has offices in London, Boston, Canada, Shanghai and Taipei.
  • Canonical employes over 600 people in over 30 countries.
  • Canonical provides support services to help organisations round the world maximise their potential for reducing costs and improving efficiency.
  • Landscape is Canonical’s enterprise systems management tool for Ubuntu at scale.
  • Canonical customers include; AdAction, CapGemini BPO, Global Radio, La Gendarmerie Nationale, LVM, Mercardo Libre, MusicMetric, NA Bancard.
  • Canonical and the Ubuntu Project were founded by Mark Shuttleworth, entrepreneur, technologist, product strategist and First African in Space.
  • Canonical CEO, Jane Silber, has over 20 years of business development, operations and software management experience.

Ubuntu

  • ‘Ubuntu’ is an African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’, which aptly describes the open source and open community nature of the project.
  • Today, Ubuntu is the world’s third most popular PC operating system.
  • Ubuntu now has over 40 million desktop users and counting.
  • 30,000 Windows users download Ubuntu every day.
  • Canonical works with the open-source community to make each new edition of Ubuntu faster, easier and more intuitive than ever.
  • There are over 200,000 active community members contributing to Ubuntu every day.
  • New releases of Ubuntu are made available every six months, with Long-term support (LTS) releases occurring every two years.
  • The 12.04 LTS release was one of the most popular to date with over 7 million unique downloads within 24 hours of its release.
  • Ubuntu is a single operating system, with a coherent family of interfaces optimised for the PC, phone and TV.
  • Secure, fast and powerful, Ubuntu Server helps enterprises make the most of their infrastructure. Whether deploying a web farm or deploy a cloud, Ubuntu Server supports the most popular hardware and software.

Games and apps for Ubuntu

  • There are over 45,000 apps available in the Ubuntu Software Centre.
  • EA, Unity, Valve – the world’s biggest gaming companies deliver games for Ubuntu.

Our partners

  • Canonical licenses Ubuntu to OEMs and Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus all work with Canonical to install Ubuntu on their hardware.
  • Nearly 70% of the PCs shipped by the major PC companies are now certified to work with Ubuntu.
  • Canonical predicts that by 2014 nearly 10% of PCs will ship with Ubuntu pre-installed.
  • Ubuntu is supported on X86 and ARM hardware.
  • Canonical is a key contributor to Linaro, the consortium of technology vendors focused on making Linux work well on ARM.