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AT&T Chooses Ubuntu Linux Instead of Microsoft Windows (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: one of the largest cellular providers is the venerable AT&T. While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices, it is now embracing the open source kernel in a new way. You see, the company has partnered with Canonical to utilize Ubuntu for cloud, network, and enterprise applications. That's right, AT&T did not choose Microsoft's Windows when exploring options. Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.
A better headline might have been:
Canonical lands huge contract with AT&T
AT&T is a $200 billion organization, Canonical is about $10 billion. This deal might boost Canonical's revenue by 50%.
Also, it's a major credibility boost on Canonical's corporate resume. AT&T is a major, major company full of network experts, so it's a very significant endorsement of Canonical supporting large-scale applications. Consider Canonical trying to sell a new a customer, maybe Fisher Price or Nabisco:
Fisher Price: How do we have confidence that your team can support services at the scale Fisher Price needs?
Canonical rep: We run AT&T's systems, at the much larger scale they require.
Yes and no. AT&T was split up and Southwestern Bell was one of the baby bells. Then SW Bell bought the shell that AT&T had become. After so much time and so many business school weenies running the companies, AT&T is only the bastard son of MBAs.
That's what surprised me as well. Doesn't AT&T have any ownership of Unix anymore, or is it all gone to Lucent/USL/Bell Labs/SCO/Open Group/whatever? Also, GP mentioned that it's for hosting services, but for that, isn't it more of the establishment guys who are the real deal here - be it Red Hat, Suse, Debian, as opposed to Ubuntu? Looking at it any which way, AT&T made a strange decision, and the alternative was not Windows (Server), but something like either one of the old Unixes, like Solaris, or one of the established Linux distros, like Red Hat or Debian.
In telcos, Linux is the successor to Sun/Solaris. It's been happening for a while now, and it really sped up a lot when Oracle bought Sun. Windows was never a real option here.