OSNews

Ubuntu doesn't really target the market they're looking for, they're targetting small to mid-sized businesses and they started the pilot project with RHEL.

HP has certifications and expertise in place with both Red Hat and Novell; both vendors are experienced with enterprise support requirements, and have sufficient resources to support their commercial products with any SLA the customer requires, as well as the technical capabilities to address hardware issues. Commercial software packages, those few that do run on linux, generally only support RH and SLED. Not sure about RH, but SLED comes out of the box ready to work within an ActiveDirectory based network. Both RH and SLED have management tools for deploying and maintaining multiple installations.

Certainly neither RH or Novell offer anything in their distros software/application-wise that Ubuntu can't offer either, but business requirements differ greatly from personal requirements, and the community is generally far more tolerant than paid commercial customers are when things go wrong.

That's not to say that there's anything with Ubuntu or that it is inherently flawed, but if you compare Dell's approach with Ubuntu consumer PC's ("post in the forums or mailing list and hope for an answer if you have any problems, but don't call us"), that just won't cut it for business customers.

Not sure of what HP's plans are for support, or the level to which they'll integrate their vendor support with Red Hat's (or Novell's if they go that route as well), but customers can be assured that they have an enterprise-level organization backing them up either way.

It's simply targeting a different product for a different market.