From the 'business of Ubuntu' files:

Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu Linux today released Landscape 1.3 for Ubuntu system management and monitoring.

Landscape is a commercial service for helping enterprises to scale and manage multiple Ubuntu deployments on both servers and desktops.  The new release includes features for managing Ubuntu in Amazon EC2 cloud based deployments which is something that prior versions Landscape did not manage.  The Amazon EC2 support makes a whole lot of sense now since with the recent Jaunty Ubuntu release, Ubuntu has cloud capabilities and can be easily run as an Amazon EC2 instance.

The ability to effectively manage and monitor systems is a key feature for enterprise deployments and in my view Landscape is a critical component of Canonical's business strategy for Ubuntu's growth.

"Landscape simplifies system management tasks for users who run Ubuntu on physical or virtual servers in-house or some or all of their Ubuntu servers on the Amazon EC2 cloud," Ken Drachnik, Landscape business manager at Canonical said in a statement."It enables users to manage all instances from the same application. Being able to manage servers on the cloud as easily as those deployed internally is a huge boost for those deploying Ubuntu servers at scale."

The idea of system management and monitoring is one that Red Hat has been aggressively pursuing for years as well.  Red Hat is  now developing its own Red Hat Network Satellite product in the open source community as a way to handle LInux instances. To the best of my knowledge, Canonical Landscape is currently a closed source proprietary application.

**UPDATED 1:30 PM ET** I just got an email from Ken Drachnik clarifying the open source position of Landscape.

"The Landscape client is open-sourced on Launchpad so that users can see what code is running on their systems," Drachnik wrote in an email to me. "The server is proprietary."

He added that Landscape is based on open source software so that allows Canonical  to keep  costs low (e.g. they use postgreSQL as a database, not Oracle as Red Hat does). I know from my conversations with Red Hat that Network Satellite is moving to postgreSQL too (though currently it is Oracle).
 
Subscription pricing for Canonical's Landscape service is $150 per node per year.