Care to wager if Canonical's Enterprise services teams will be as forthcoming about the evolution of their service offerings as Red Hat has been with the development of RHX? The Canonical ISV partnership push is really aimed at the LTS release. Would you call the number of listed packages in that partner repository for hardy a marked success? I wouldn't. The number of partner packages listed for Hardy is quite..meager.
What happened? http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=746493
From the discussion it looks like the partner repository concept has been around since at least Dapper 6.06 (3 years) and Hardy was suppose to be the "hit the ground running" moment..and the partnership hasn't grown at all. I think anyone who really cares about the ISV market should contrast that experience with the Red Hat's RHX experience and decide for themselves who has the model that best services the combined interests of users and ISVs.
I think it's pretty safe to say that ISV's aren't falling over themselves to pay for Canonical's packaging services and enter into the partner repository. Maybe there really are a mob of ISV's waiting for the next LTS, a year from now, to jump on board and get into that partner repository..along side..the flashplugin package that's sitting so very lonely in the Jaunty partner repository today.