Anyone hoping to see Canonical IPO this year will need to temper their expectations.
Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has told TechCrunch that the company is not currently in a position to go public.
Speaking to journalist Frederic Lardinois at the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada Mark said Canonical “…will do the right thing at the right time …there is a process that you have to go through and that takes time.”
“We know what we need to hit in terms of revenue and growth and we’re on track.”
Canonical ditched the unprofitable Unity desktop to double-down on its successes in cloud and IoT
Canonical’s decision to, as Shuttleworth puts it, “have a commercial focus” had a dramatic impact on the free software community.
The company ditched its unprofitable projects, like the home-grown Unity desktop and the beleaguered Ubuntu Phone, to double-down on its successes in enterprise, cloud computing, and helping to power the next wave of “smart” devices with Ubuntu Core and Snaps.
Shuttleworth adds that the “painful” decisions are now paying off for the company.
“We picked cloud and IoT as the areas to develop that. And being a public company, given that most of our customers are now global institutions, it makes for us also to be a global institution. I think it would be great for my team to be part of a public company. It would be a lot of work, but we are not shy of work.”
For now the company is focused on adding more big-name customers to its portfolio, with companies in the financial services sector a specific aim.
- Source: TechCrunch