Canonical goes public
Mark Shuttleworth sheds light on the reason for the recent big changes as it looks to float on the stockmarket.
Last issue we reported on some of the significant changes that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was going through, including the abandonment of Unity 8 and the company’s mobile ambitions, as well as numerous staff layoffs and the departure of CEO Jane Siber.
Now, in a recent interview, returning CEO Mark Shuttleworth revealed that one of the driving reasons behind these changes was to prepare Canonical for an IPO (initial public offering).
By making Canonical a public company via an IPO, rather than a privately held company as it is currently, it can raise money from public investors. In addition, by dropping services and features that were costing the company money, and concentrating on revenue-generating elements such as Ubuntu, its cloud services and containerrelated technologies, Canonical will hopefully become a more appealing IPO prospect.
According to Shuttleworth, Canonical will concentrate on “putting the company on the path to an IPO. We must figure out what steps we need to take moving forward…Ubuntu will never die… [but] We need to work out more of our IoT path. At the same time, we had to cut out those parts that couldn’t meet an investors’ needs. The immediate work is get all parts of the company profitable.”
Shuttleworth insisted that there’s no timeline for the IPO just yet, because there’s considerable work involved in making sure Canonical is profitable, but that after a round of investment, the company will go public. This, he promises, will happen “sooner rather than later”.