If you're referring to the use of Metal in the name, I doubt it. It is a different market. Canonical isn't out to make millions from a highly focused tool that gets a large amount of its value from being free for anyone to use, forever.

A similar situation happened when Apple adopted the name Launchpad for one of their services.

Er, why? Apple stopped caring about the cloud and traditional server market a while back.

Because Apple used the word Metal to name one of their new APIs?

Apple's new Graphics API is called 'Metal'.

The OP might have stumbled upon this while searching the web for apple's metal, if that's the case it shows that the naming collision could be a good way to have people discover the product unexpectedly.

I don't think there is likely to be much confusion. Looks like this would be called "MAAS" or "Metal as a Service," never just "Metal."

TBH I thought this was announcing cloud based graphics rendering until I saw the Ubuntu domain.

At first sight I really thought it was somehow related to Apple..

Did Apple present Cloud Services yesterday aside of the Dropbox clone (iCloud Drive)?