Here you will find issues relating to the SMB Market, Running an IT Business, as well as SBS Specifically, The Triad SBS Group, and some handy How To Aricles as well as random thoughts I stumble across. -
Like Mark Twain before it the news of the death of SBS has been greatly exaggerated!
Posted on July 9th, 2012 7 comments
What Microsoft actually said was there would not be another version of the on premises version of SBS developed. SBS 2011 is the last one, but it is not dead yet. It will be available for a year through most channels and a year and a half through the oem channel. It will be supported and patched. That is not dead, that is ample notice that there will be no new version, so if you need an on prem suite get busy and deploy it now. This is in sharp contrast to how they handled the death of EBS where they just pulled the plug while the next version was in Beta.
I am not telling you there are not big changes afoot, there are. But you have time to figure out what you want to with your business and what direction you want to take it. There are still going to be clients not in a mad race to the cloud and they are going to need servicing. You have ages in computer time to adjust and learn some new technology so when SBS is really dead you have the skills to still deliver an on prem solution stack, most likely based on some virtualization technology. And yes you are going to have to learn how to install the pieces you want in your stack, daddy is not going to do it for you anymore. Don’t get me wrong I have loved SBS through its entire existence, but this is not the end of the world.
If you were you I would be more concerned with Microsoft’s abandonment of the SMB Channel in favor of its enterprise partners as well as direct delivery of software and services via the cloud. This seems to me to be a bigger threat than the end of SBS which they have been slowly deprecating since its heyday in 2003. This may be just what the User Group or IT Pro Group world required to start a long needed revitalization. Microsoft is not going out of the software business, just changing the rules of how we need to do business with them and opening the door for someone else to step in and lead the SMB Channel that they apparently no longer care about.
We need to figure out how to do business with Microsoft as an adversary instead of a partner, because like it or not they still have the solutions most of our clients want/need. So we must find a way to move forward that is profitable for us and profitable for Microsoft, for if we don’t we will all need to learn to flip burgers and if we do that, we certainly will drive down the value of burger flipping.
So as you can see the sky is not falling, this is just your wake up call to get busy and take the reins of your future and stop letting Microsoft drive your bus, hop up in the seat and take the wheel!
EDIT Actully this webinar is tomorrow not today 7/10/2012 6:00pm PST, (Thx Russ for pointing it out)
BTW I highly recommend you join in the conversation being hosted by my friend Amy Babinchak at http://www.thirdtier.net/2012/07/webinar-future-of-small-business-it/What is this all about, in case you have been sleeping under a rock,
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2012/07/05/windows-small-business-server-essentials-becomes-windows-server-2012-essentials.aspxAlso checkou this pdf, http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?Linkid=257790
7 responses to “Like Mark Twain before it the news of the death of SBS has been greatly exaggerated!”
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I’m not sure that the news has been greatly exaggerated in as much as the reactions have been a little bit more emotional then I expected.
Amy posted on Steven Teiger’s Facebook comment recently a very similar response, as have I but I like the way that you’ve wrapped it up in a sobering Alka Seltzer.
If you watch some of the keynote coverage at #WPC12 this week, you’ll see your route options for your ‘bus’.
Nice post Andy and thanks for calming everyone down 🙂
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Steven Teiger July 9th, 2012 at 12:23
Not dead, but terminally I’ll 🙂
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Thanks, Andy. COBOL programs I wrote in the 1970’s are still in use. Mapper programs I wrote in the 1980’s are still running. People are still using Windows 98 and Office 98 in the year 2012. So, who knows what will happen with SBS!
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Steven Teiger July 9th, 2012 at 12:49
That should have said ill, naturally.
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Andy, Microsoft has been treating the SMB marketplace (at least here in Australia) as an adversary for some years now. It certainly is leaving the door wide open to products such as ClearOS, Kerio and MDaemon.
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Mark Crall July 16th, 2012 at 15:42
What, this blog is still active? I thought it was retired with SBS… 😉
Seriously, Microsoft is not as much abandoning the SMB VARs as they are putting their investment of time, resources and money into products and services that they believe will have greater ROI in the long term. They do not see the value in providers that make 80% of their money in support services and the other 20% selling boxes with some OEMs name (where MS takes a huge margin cut in OEM licensing). Can you blame them? They are not abandoning anyone, they are simply being responsible to their shareholders – you know the people that invested their hard in money and expect Microsoft to make the right business decisions or will use the BoD to fire the executives that fail to do so.
In short, it’s not personal, it business. If you are running a business and not a lifestyle then you understand hard decision are never personal, they are just a part of making money – the reason businesses exist. -
Allen Goldberg July 19th, 2012 at 10:50
It is stunnung to me that a company can have a business silo dedicated to Small Business, yet truly understand so little about small business.
The recent death of many SMB products bing sunsetted or ‘pulled’ are actions which speaks far more than their advertising words…..and once again, Microsoft thinks that SMB around the country can be fooled.
EVERY enterprise comes from SMB incubation and even though the success ratio is small, that does not mean, small businesses are not worth having as customers…yet with the past five years of actions…Micosoft is signaling, SMB are simply not worth it…I will not name the long list of products thay have removed.
It is saddening and very frustrating to think that the largest software company, after all these years…simply still does not get it at all!!
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Susanne Dansey July 9th, 2012 at 11:48