When you think Ubuntu, you almost certainly think of it as a desktop distribution. And, make no mistake about it, Ubuntu 9.10 is a great desktop distribution, but that’s not what Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is focusing on with this release and the next, long-term support version, which will follow this one. No, Canonical has its eyes on the prize and that’s the server market.

The sad truth is that, except for Novell with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), the big-name Linux distributors tend to focus on servers. After-all, as Red Hat has shown, that’s where the real money is.

This isn’t new. Canonical has been serious about servers for a long time now. This release underlines that point.

Even before Ubuntu 9.10 was in beta, Canonical introduced PSE (Premium Service Engineer), a new level of support for large enterprises. This gives corporate customers the option of a single point of contact along with access to all the way up to Canonical’s platform engineers.

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