Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder and CEO, sits down with Randy Holloway, Global GTM Leader at Microsoft, to discuss the current technology landscape. They explore AI’s impact on organizations and how open source in the public cloud is helping teams innovate.
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My name is Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical. I'm here in Berlin at the Canonical commercial sprint with colleagues from around the world to discuss strategy, products, and partnerships. I'm delighted to sit down with Randy Holloway from Microsoft to talk about bringing open source to market on Azure.
Thanks, Mark. I'm Randy Holloway, leading cloud and AI platforms go-to-market at Microsoft, focusing on migration and modernization. AI is a key driver. This year, we're prioritizing growth in Linux and open source because that's what customers need. Excited to be here.
Microsoft has read the AI landscape beautifully with moves like OpenAI, Copilot, and GitHub. You've positioned your stack brilliantly for AI. How do you see the intersection of open source and AI, and what are you prioritizing?
The market reality is that most development energy is in open source. We've worked on our open source strategy for 15 years. Today, it's about meeting customers where they are. Confidential compute on Azure is a key initiative, combining public cloud benefits with privacy. How do you see that coming together?
Our joint work validating confidential compute with Ubuntu has been critical. We see strong interest from financial services and a trend toward data sovereignty. Customers view confidential compute as a way to implement sovereign controls in the public cloud. Growth is tremendous across industries.
It's an incredible industry effort to make CPUs, GPUs, and storage provably confidential. We've worked with Azure and Nvidia on encrypted GPUs. What about the developer experience? Where is the open-source developer experience in the cloud going?
Customers focus on developer productivity and tool chains integrating AI like GitHub Copilot. Open source is key for speed and training data. We see AI making developers more productive. For most customers, it's about delivering business solutions quickly. On Microsoft's platform, we offer AI Foundry for model as a service, but also support open infrastructure. Capacity and multicloud are drivers. We aim to provide the right choices for customers.
Shuttleworth, M. (2025, December 4). From AI to quick-deploy applications: Mark Shuttleworth and Randy Holloway discuss technology trends [Interview transcript]. Canonical Ubuntu. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1052515/
MLA
Mark Shuttleworth. "From AI to quick-deploy applications: Mark Shuttleworth and Randy Holloway discuss technology trends." Canonical Ubuntu, 4 Dec. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1052515/.
BibTeX
@misc{shuttleworth2025_1052515,
author = {Mark Shuttleworth},
title = {From AI to quick-deploy applications: Mark Shuttleworth and Randy Holloway discuss technology trends},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Canonical Ubuntu. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {dec},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1052515/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
