Don’t take our word for it–here’s feedback from the PowerBroker Open community, including customers, partners, and contributors.
Linux Partners:
We are excited about the Likewise Open project and the solutions that it will provide Canonical’s enterprise customers and other major deployments of Ubuntu, said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project. Likewise Open allows us to provide end users of the Ubuntu operating system the ability to join their systems to Microsoft Active Directory for user authentication. We look forward to the debut of Likewise Open in the April release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support).
Likewise Open is an important development for our enterprise customers who wish to use open source software to enable users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to authenticate against Active Directory, said Karl Wirth, director, Security Business, at Red Hat. We plan to ship Likewise Open together with Samba in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2.
Very few organizations are running one operating system exclusively across their network. Likewise makes authentication of non-Windows systems to AD easily installable and freely available,” said Richard Seibt, past CEO of SuSE Linux AG. “Likewise Open is fast becoming the defacto solution for secure authentication of UNIX, Linux and Mac systems with AD.
Likewise makes it easy to integrate Ubuntu desktops and servers into corporate networks for secure and controlled access to information, said Matt Asay, COO of Canonical. “We have been working with Likewise as a trusted partner since Ubuntu 8.04LTS and we’re thrilled with the reception of the Ubuntu community and excited for further growth in the enterprise.
Customers:
Likewise Open will allow NIH [the National Institutes of Health] to reduce costs by joining our Linux systems to Active Directory. By working with the open source community, Likewise Software has made it easy for Linux distributors to include Active Directory authentication as part of the operating system and easy for centers like ours to deploy the solution. — Jeff Plum | Senior Engineer | National Institute of Health
I have successfully deployed Likewise Open to Macs and Ubuntu Lucid installs, said Glenn Vitale, Blount County Schools. I have tried others in the past, but I recently removed all that and just ran Likewise Open. I was floored that what took me a couple hours in the past, I got done in minutes.
OEM Partners:
The combination of Citrix XenServer virtualization software with Likewise Open authentication software gives users integrated enterprise control over access to information — the most important asset in the organization, said Benn Schreiber, director of business development at Citrix Systems. “It’s critical to provision users, applications and computing resources so that our virtualization technology has the same high levels of security as actual physical hardware.”
As customers continue on the journey to cloud computing, they need to leverage existing security infrastructure for their virtualized environments, said Patrick Lin, vice president, product management, VMware. To help meet this demand, we plan to leverage Likewise software to seamlessly integrate this capability in large-scale environments running VMware vSphere, providing a secure way for customers to manage their access controls.
