Is the Ubuntu Edge a good fit for the enterprise?

The tech community has been abuzz over the past week over Canoncial’s Ubuntu Edge campaign — enough so for a lively Ask Me Anything interview on Reddit with the company’s CEO, Mark Shuttleworth. There’s no denying that the company’s vision of a cutting-edge “superphone” that doubles as a PC and that runs both desktop Ubuntu and Android is intriguing to gadget-loving geeks, open source advocates, and developers. While Canonical is understandably focused on securing buy-in from those groups, the company also has its sights set on a market that could make or break the project: enterprise users.

Just how eager is Canonical to secure enterprise backing? One of the packages (or “perks”) in the company’s $32 million Indiegogo campaign is called the Enterprise 100 Bundle. For $80,000, a contributor will receive “100 Ubuntu Edge smartphones, plus access to best-practice workshops and 30 days of online support to help CIOs and IT managers integrate Ubuntu for Android into the workplace.”

The question, though, is whether enterprises are actually going to bite. Consider that Canonical has thus far convinced thousands of folks to fork over from $725 on up to $10,000 for individual phones — but has not yet received a pledge for even one of the 50 Enterprise 100 Bundles it’s offering.

Yes, it’s still early in the campaign, and it’s conceivable that a CXO or two out there is mulling the offer. But Canonical has a lot of work to do in convincing the enterprise of the business case for the Ubuntu Edge, which not only comprises a yet-unproven hardware concept — a dockable quad-core smartphone that can double as a PC — but that also runs a desktop OS that has barely managed to penetrate the business world.

InfoWorld challenged Canonical to lay out the business case for the Ubuntu Edge, both from a technology and financial perspective. The company’s head of engineering Victor Palau (read: an actually in-the-trenches techie, not a marketing executive) accepted the challenge. What follows is an interview conducted via email between Palau and InfoWorld.

InfoWorld: Please tell us a bit about your role at Canonical. Victor Palau: I head the engineering team at Canonical that delivers commercial projects together with our partners around Phone and Hyperscale products. Phone includes Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu Edge, and Ubuntu for Android. Hyperscale are servers made with thousands of mobile phone chipsets.

At a high level, why should the CEO of a Fortune 500 company consider spending $80,000 on the Enterprise 100 Bundle of Ubuntu Edges? For a simple reason: It will reduce her hardware and operational cost. Most sales executives and consultants are provided both a mobile phone (to be always connected) and an ultra-portable laptop. The laptop is normally required for productivity applications, reviewing sales forecast, writing proposals. High-end hardware is normally chosen because the user needs long battery life and a very portable solution.

A converged phone like Ubuntu Edge is a much more economical solution both in terms of hardware and for running operational cost. You can have a single data plan without having to train the user on how to set a Wi-Fi hotspot on their phones. You’ve simplified to only require a single device management strategy. And finally, you can remote wipe any data on the Ubuntu Edge, something which is hard to do with laptops.

How about from the CTO’s perspective? What’s the tech case for replacing, for example, each users’ Windows laptop and iPhone with a single “super” smartphone that runs Ubuntu and Android? A CTO will be looking at future technologies, such as OpenStack and software as a service, and probably finding that his users will be late to adopt them because they would prefer to use well-known, highly inefficient Windows clients. Ubuntu Edge is a change agent, which not only encourages higher mobility, but will also drive faster adoption of SaaS via either Remote Desktop technologies (when docked to a monitor) or standard Web 2.0 business applications like Salesforce that can be easily accessed from both platforms (Ubuntu and Android).

And from the CFO’s perspective? Will this somehow make the bean counters in accounting happy? Or is this not about cost savings? Yes, this will make CFOs quite happy. As mentioned, there are large operational and hardware savings associated with mobile convergence — especially if you look to a future where employees are sourcing their own phones.

Could you speak to scenarios in which enterprise organizations would benefit from fully replacing certain (or all) users’ PCs and smartphones with this device? Some really interesting scenarios are highly mobile workforces, especially if bundled with a portable dock or monitor. Also, what we call roaming workers, like me for example. People who split their time between two or more workstations. I work from the office and home, but you can imagine also a consultant that spends large periods of time between different offices. These types of employees can become a security risk as they commute often and are more likely to misplace their laptop. The Ubuntu Edge desktop environment can be fully encrypted and wiped remotely using standard MDM solutions.

Finally, there are other users who move around a workspace, like doctors visiting multiple wards, for whom carrying a laptop is not very convenient, but they might have access to shared docking stations.

Is this a suitable PC replacement for employees who rely on graphic- or memory-intensive applications? There will always be specialized use cases that a workstation or a high-end i7 laptop is better for than Ubuntu Edge. However, with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage space, this is getting really close.

I think nowadays most iOS apps are available also for Android. The beauty of Edge truly is the ability to get a full desktop experience on a mobile device. Desktop Ubuntu has had integrated Windows VDI support since our 12.10 release, and we partner with leading VDI vendors to ensure their clients shine. So for legacy Windows apps, Ubuntu Edge will be a more secure, more manageable, and more portable Windows client than your standard Windows XP laptop.

Windows PC applications can still be accessed from Ubuntu Edge using a Remote Desktop solution. The Windows application runs on a server, the user connect to it using her credentials, and the application output is streamed directly to the phone. To the user, it looks like the application is running within the Ubuntu Desktop.

Tech analyst Matt Asay posed the question on ReadWrite as to whether the developer community will buy into the Edge concept, which is critical if it’s going to gain any traction. He suggested that the Edge’s fate is tied mostly to the Android developer community because Ubuntu just hasn’t penetrated the desktop market.

To paraphase Asay:

The Ubuntu Edge taps into the Android ecosystem as well as the existing Ubuntu desktop ecosystem. But I suspect most people, most of the time, are only going to care about the Android environment. Canonical has long had less than 1 percent of the desktop market, and now that market is in free fall. The Ubuntu ecosystem, in other words, may not matter. So the real question is, will Canonical’s ‘Ubuntu for Android with some level of file-sharing,’ as [Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth] describes it, be able to piggyback on the broader Android ecosystem?

How do you respond to that? Accessing the Android developer community is a good question. Ubuntu is the preferred choice of work environment for Android users. From that point of view, what’s better than being able to code and test your applications on the same device?

For years now, companies have tried to come up with viable PC replacements, such as traditional thin clients, Internet devices (such as the Chromebook), tablets, and dockable portable mobile devices like the Motorola Xoom. What does the Ubuntu Edge have that these other form factors don’t? Thin clients lack mobility, Internet devices lack offline work support, tablets lack the productivity of a keyboard, dockable phones historically lack an operating system geared to be used as a desktop. Ubuntu Edge builds on the strengths of all of these with none of the limitations. It is mobile, it can stream Windows apps, can work online and offline, and gives you a great user experience both as a phone and as a desktop.

In that vein, what stars have aligned that the time to bring this sort of device to market is 2014 instead of a couple of years ago? I am thinking of factors like advances in mobile hardware technology, Wi-Fi, virtualization, the cloud, and the maturity of open source. Key areas for me are low latency and high bandwidth of LTE, wide support of virtualization providers for Linux, large adoption of Linux by hardware providers, and low power CPUs that can even become servers.

Why go via Indiegogo, especially if you’re looking to woo enterprise companies? It is an arguably unorthodox approach to acquiring funding — especially if you’re looking for $32 million. We are continuing to work with Tier 1 manufacturers to bring Ubuntu-based convergence devices to the market. However, we felt that the industry has stagnated in innovation around hardware designs. We thought that crowdsourcing would be a great platform to test drive some of the most cutting-edge technologies.

What sort of feedback have you gotten from enterprise customers? Are you at all concerned that no one has pledged for the Enterprise Bundle? We have very good feedback from enterprises for Ubuntu for Android. I think potential enterprise customers are probably waiting to see the Ubuntu Edge campaign gather momentum and participate once we have achieved over 60 percent of funding. I would encourage them not to wait! We need their support early on.

Please provide more detail as to what the companies who purchase the $80,000 Enterprise Bundle will receive. What kind of training and support comes with it? We had been working with manufacturers and enterprises on convergence device trials. Our team has gained a lot of knowledge on how to leverage these devices to get the best out of them. We will provide access to that knowledge to any enterprise that pledges for the Enterprise Bundle. You will get direct access to our engineering team for any support and rollout questions. It is a good deal!

This story, “Is the Ubuntu Edge a good fit for the enterprise?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.