Thursday, June 28, 2012: India is surely getting open to open source. Don't believe it? Well, in that case you gotto read this one. Canonical's CEO has revealed that Ubuntu adoption in India increased by about 160 per cent last year. Speaking to EFYTimes.com, Jane Silber, chief executive officer, Canonical said, “We have chosen India for our biggest retail expansion after China because we see tremendous opportunity and growth in this country. India is one of the countries where Ubuntu is most successful and well received. We see significant growth in Ubuntu adoption in India. Over the last year we saw 160 per cent growth. So, we believe that there is real potential and demand here. I would like to make special mention of our partners because this is done with them. So we can go to the market through our OEMs. Canonical is not building computers and Canonical does not have stores. Our OEM partners know very well and have much more data than we do about the many machines that ship in India with Ubuntu pre-installed. Our OEM partners believe that we can grow with proper marketing and education.”
This data is not an exact figure but a lump sum quoted by Silber. She said, “We do not have an exact number. Since Ubuntu is free, we don't ask people to register. We think people should use it on their choice. So we don't have an exact count of the users but what we can do is look at the number of matrix and trends in that. We can look at downloads, we can look at security updates, we can look at machines that are shipped with OEMs with Ubuntu pre-installed. When you look at these numbers, what you can get is trend and relative growth. And this figure has been derived with this method.”

It is worth mentioning here that Canonical has recently joined hands with Dell to sell Ubuntu pre-loaded laptops in 850 Dell stores across India. With this partnership, Canonical aims to make Ubuntu a common name in India. Silber said, “We want to reach out to people who want a simple, easy-to-use, secure computing experience. Frankly, we want to reach out to people who don't care much about operating systems. We are pretty strong already among the people who care about operating systems. In the big scheme of the world, people who go to a website and download an operating system and install that on their computers form a relatively small number. This makes our initiative particularly significant because we want to reach out to a whole new audience … the mass consumer audience … and it's important for Ubuntu to sustain our growth and it's important for companies like Dell and other OEMs as well. We work with others besides Dell because it helps them bring an open solution to a larger number of people.”

This is one of the biggest bet that Canonical has taken for the Indian market. But the CEO is confident of making Ubuntu a name among common people, which will hopefully happen slowly but steadily. She said, “There is not a single trick that will work for this. It is all part of a process. This retail environment is one piece of that puzzle. Think about how people learn brands in general. They see some media, they may see advertising, they see it around when they walk into the shops and things like that. People learn about things through their friends talking about them, through personal recommendations. Ubuntu is fortunate that we have a very strong advocacy base, a very strong set of users and community which definitely helps spread the word about Ubuntu. People also hear about it when they hear about it in other environments. We do increasingly large desktop deployments in government organisations, in enterprises and in schools. So, an entire generation of children are using Ubuntu as their standard computing environment in schools. That is normal to them as opposed to all of us who probably grew up in Windows environment. We did not even know that there is any other option. We have very large school deployments in Spain. In India, we have significant education deployments. People are also learning about new technologies. There is an interesting cross-over of technology in the sense that people expect to use the same technology at work that they use at home. This is all about the consumerisation of IT and trends. But the reverse also works. People many-a-times take the technology they use in office at home. It is the decision that the work places make for people and after they get used to it on their office desktops, they take it to their homes too. We see Ubuntu spreading that way as well. So, there is no simple answer to this. There is no multi-million dollar advertising budget that will make Ubuntu a household name all of a sudden. It is something that we have to attack from many angles. We are doing one such effort through our partnership with OEMs. Ubuntu will be available pre-installed in a machine rather than having to download it. We want to attack through retail marketing, through services that we provide to the enterprises and through the Ubuntu community.”