ISV Program
The open source ecosystem you can trust to build your software
Independent software vendors (ISVs) around the world rely on Canonical's comprehensive open source ecosystem to support their solutions, products, and software. Our ISV partners benefit from trusted open source, with long-term support, security maintenance, and compliance-certified components. Become an ISV partner today, and embed Canonical's software into your products.
What is Canonical's ISV program?
Through our ISV program, Canonical offers software partners the opportunity to work with Canonical, and integrate elements of our open source ecosystem into their solutions and products.
We offer a transparent pricing model per instance and use case, as well as engineering support and joint marketing efforts, to drive your solution's success.
Embedding
Embed Canonical's trusted open source catalog into your solutions. Benefit from a familiar ecosystem for your developers, the stability of long term security maintenance, and software that helps you meet major compliance requirements.
Tailored solutions
Get better performance with optimized solutions from Canonical's open source ecosystem, tailored to fit your needs and use cases.
Validation
Canonical checks and provides licenses to confirm our software is compatible with your solutions. This helps to expand the open source ecosystem, and ensures the end user can be confident that they can run Canonical products on your software, and vice versa.
Meet some of our ISV partners
These companies power their solutions with Canonical's open source ecosystem.
Why embed Canonical software?
Canonical offers solutions for every layer of your stack. Build exactly what you need using our enterprise grade, trusted, and security-maintained open source ecosystem.
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Use open source to build better, faster
As a recent Linux Foundation report reveals, enterprises worldwide are increasingly adopting open source software. The report found:
- 86% believe open source software improves productivity
- 82% believe open source software enables innovation
- 79% report improved software quality due to open source
Open source software enables you to deliver innovation faster, and you won't be held back by proprietary lock in and limited portability. Embedding open source in your solutions will help to ensure that you stay at the cutting edge, whilst enjoying enterprise-grade support and security maintenance.
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Reduce support complexity
Working with multiple vendors for different open source components across different layers of the stack creates complicated contracts with multiple vendors – not to mention integration challenges.
Canonical's extensive open source ecosystem gives you the choice you want, whilst simplifying access to support and security maintenance.
Technical excellence and support for your solution
Security
Security vulnerabilities in unmaintained software can create serious risks. As recent IDC research demonstrates, almost 60% of IT decision-makers are not confident in their organization's ability to patch critical vulnerabilities within 24 hours.
With Ubuntu Pro, software is security maintained and patched for up to 15 years, ensuring business continuity for your end customers, without forcing major upgrades.
Certified components
Regulated industries can provide stable revenue streams – however, meeting regulations requires lengthy and expensive certification journeys. Accelerate your time to market and reduce the cost of initial investment with components that have already been certified.
Canonical offers certified components for compliance and hardening, including FIPS 140-2 and 140-3, DISA STIG profiles, CIS level 1 and 2 hardening, and Common Criteria.
Engineering support
ISV partners benefit from Direct L3 engineering support, providing access to the technical expertise needed to help resolve complex code-related issues.
Custom image builds
Canonical can provide custom image builds for specialized compute environments. These are tailored for your performance,
platform, compliance, and governance requirements, to help your solution function as smoothly as possible.
We also provide ongoing image maintenance and delivery, supporting easier Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline ingestion.
Joint go to market support
Ownership, branding, and commercial control
ISV partners provide direct support to end customers, ensuring a cohesive and unified brand experience for users.
Likewise, Canonical's ISV partners get trademark, modification, and redistribution rights, so you can brand, customize, and commercialize joint solutions effectively.
Widen your brand's reach and establish authority
Through our ISV program, members can broaden their brand exposure. To support our partners, Canonical:
- Features partners on the Canonical website, and provides the ability to use our trademarks and logos
- Takes part in joint marketing: Canonical partners with you on promotional and go to market activities
- Provides a dedicated partner team, including resources for GTM, technical training, and marketing efforts
How ISVs accelerated growth with our software ecosystem
"Our FedRAMP solution is powered by AWS… it's a very big deal when it comes to how we're servicing our public sector customers. We're very excited to partner with Canonical to provide that solution to the public sector market."
Phoebe Nerdahl
Senior Director, U.S. Public Sector, SNYK
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"We built our FedRAMP environment at breakneck speeds. We got everything up and running in six months, and mirroring and understanding the Ubuntu Pro packages took less than two weeks. It was just so fast."
Rocky Olsen
Principal Software Engineer, SRE Operations, Lucid Software
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"It just works. Of all the things that give me trouble and keep me up at night, Ubuntu is not one of them."
Patrick Kaeding
Staff Security Engineer, LaunchDarkly
What software can you embed?
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Enterprise-grade Linux OS
Ubuntu is the most popular open source Linux OS, and the only free, multi-cloud-friendly option with commercial support available via Ubuntu Pro.
Ubuntu Pro extends enterprise security and compliance directly to your developers' workstations. Get up to 15 years of security coverage for both the OS and your mission-critical open source application stack, ensuring your desktops meet stringent compliance standards. Provide your team with a secure development environment, complete with the latest toolchains and patches for all major apps and libraries.
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Security-maintained, ultra-small containers
Elevate your security posture and improve resource efficiency with Canonical’s production-ready OCI-compliant containers.
Our chiseled containers reduce attack surface and potential vulnerabilities by eliminating excess components, helping to keep your systems safer. We simplify meeting compliance benchmarks even in highly regulated industries through long-term support, security maintenance, and cryptographic assurance.
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Simplify multi-cloud operations with Kubernetes
Integrating with our CNCF-conformant Canonical Kubernetes reduces the complexity of managing containerized applications across diverse cloud environments by automating container deployment, scaling, and lifecycle management. It provides an abstraction layer, making Data & AI applications portable across development frameworks, with minimal necessary adaptations. We also support popular Kubernetes add-ons.
Canonical Kubernetes offers an efficient cloud-native platform for massive cloud infrastructures as well as edge deployments and SOHO (small office/home office) data centers.
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Enterprise AI and ML solutions
Run your entire AI/ML lifecycle on a single, integrated stack with your trusted software provider. Through our partnerships with hardware and silicon vendors like NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, Advantech, and AMD, we ensure our solutions run smoothly across hardware types and architectures.
Canonical offers security-maintained, supported AI and ML software, with predictable TCO.
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Canonical's open source data solutions are engineered for critical workloads, delivering optimized return on investment — even across multi-cloud environments.
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Hardware automation for your data center
Managing data center hardware takes a lot of resources: time, money, and effort. But it doesn't need to. Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) automates the discovery, provisioning, and deployment of bare metal servers, transforming your data center into a cloud-like on-demand pool of resources.
OpenStack
Canonical OpenStack is our highly customizable private cloud platform. Canonical's tooling streamlines OpenStack deployment, modelling, implementations, and orchestration. Try our private cloud pricing calculator to find out how cost-effective Canonical OpenStack would be for your organization.
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MicroCloud
MicroCloud is our straightforward, featureful, low entry barrier cloud. Designed for smaller on-premise environments, MicroCloud means users can spin up a private cloud in minutes. .
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Streamlined storage
Ceph is an elastic distributed storage system which combines block, file, and object storage at scale. Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant containers (Rocks) are available. Ceph is a cost-effective solution, helping organizations save as much as 50% on data storage. For a hands-on example, try the Canonical Ceph pricing calculator to find out how much a Ceph cluster could save.