How exciting is this? ownCloud comes out of stealth in December, and, in anticipation of launching our first commercial product, we have signed a partnership agreement with Univention, a leader in open source software in Central Europe.
What a great fit: Univention is focused on the Linux needs of SMB customers, as well as schools and public entities. But SMBs need more than just Linux, they need a directory- and management infrastructure to control their IT environment and not depend on Microsoft technologies. Their customers have local storage; and computers in the local network are nicely connected through Samba, CIFS, NFS and other local network protocols, but they need to connect this local storage to mobile devices. Smart Phones, Laptops, Netbooks, etc. — users want to have access everywhere (Sales people, for instance want to have their data sheets and present on their iPads now, even if they are off the network for some reason).
More and more of those customers also do want to use the cloud for server and storage capacity. But they like to have local cloud providers and again the question is how to.
