Posts Tagged ‘EBS 2008’

EBS 2008 is dead… no wait… it’s not…

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

It seems that just days before the official death of EBS 2008 (June 30, 2010), someone within Microsoft has decided that maybe it’s not so dead after all.  I reported back in March, that Microsoft had discontinued EBS 2008, but it seems I may have been wrong… or am I?

This blog post posted on June 25, 2010 shows that someone missed the memo about EBS being dead… Further more the author links to this article June 15, 2010 which talks about how good EBS is and how well suited for the market it is.  Sorry mate – Microsoft killed the product…or have they???  I wish they’d get the story straight.

Tags: EBS 2008, Microsoft
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EBS 2008 returns on clustered iPads!!!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Embargoed until 12:00am, April 1st, 2010

It gives me great pleasure to announce that today, EBS 2008 will be re-released as a new product called iEBS2008.  We now understand the real reason for the announcement a few weeks back was that Microsoft were indeed reengineering EBS 2008 to take advantage of some amazing technology that they were secretly working on in the back rooms in Redmond and Cupertino.

iEBS2008 is designed to run exclusively on the new Apple iPads which are due to be shipped in the next few days.  iEBS2008 has been optimised for Cloud computing and combines this with clusters of iPads to provide a truly resilient solution to the medium business space.  iEBS2008 will automatically combine groups of three iPads automatically and will deploy the Management Server, Messaging Server and Security Server in as little as 15 minutes.  Yes – you heard it here first – the 15 minute install of the old SBS 2003 days is back with a vengeance.  The clustered iPad scenario will allow for fast / easy replacement of a failed unit without need for massive amounts of technical knowledge. It’s also rumoured that iEBS2008 will feature a new management console incorporating Microsoft Surface technology.

The advantage of offering iEBS2008 on the iPad platform becomes immediately clear when you look at the commotion around the entire Apple iPad launch.  Every IT manager instantly wants one.  Microsoft are clearly wanting to ride along with this and they figured out that having anything running on the nice shiny iPad is bound to be successful

Rumours also abound that Microsoft are secretly working on a replacement for SBS 2008, to be known as iSBS2010 or iSBS2008R2 (name not decided as yet).  This new product will work on the smaller cousin of the iPad, the iPhone and the iPod Touch.  Microsoft have been very quiet about this for some time and don’t plan on announcing anything more for some months but it is clear – they are keen to leverage the fast adoption of the Apple products in a case of “if you can’t beat em, join em…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes – today is April 1st… hope you remembered that when reading

Tags: EBS 2008, Humour, SBS 2008 R2
Posted in Blog | 5 Comments »

New SMB Comic Strip

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

You know – it all gets too serious at times, this IT stuff.  It’s great though when someone can take the time to have a laugh at the industry   Fellow SBS MVP Tim Barrett has started a comic strip focused on our end of town… his first instalment is here – I thought this was particularl funny after the cancellation of EBS and my blogs on ithere,  here and here over the last 2 weeks.  Hope you enjoy it!

Tags: EBS 2008
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EBS 2008 is dead – Post Mortem time

Monday, March 15th, 2010

I spent some time this last week being very angry and upset over Microsoft’s decision to kill the EBS 2008 and future mid market product based on it.  It’s now a week later and I’ve got to say I’m really surprised at the lack of response from other resellers on this topic.  I’m also somewhat surprised at some of the comments and in particular who they come from on my previous blog entry from a week ago.  Don’t get me wrong – I really appreciate it and I think it’s helped "realign" my expectations for the future.  I don’t like to end things on a negative and I always try hard to look for the light at the end of the tunnel, so where to from here?  I thought a post mortem would be in order as I believe very much in trying to learn from our mistakes.

Why did this hurt me and my business badly?

I think the first reason it hurt was because I personally had invested a LOT of time into EBS 2008.  I had for 12 months last year, worked part time with Microsoft in getting the message out there to the channel.  I was tasked with helping resellers understand the EBS positioning and messaging at a technical level along with other things. I was able to help project the message to the channel because I personally believed in it.  I believed that this product had what we needed to help move things along in the Medium business space.

I have over the past 4-5 years been involved in discussions with the EBS team as the product developed.  There are bits of EBS that I can say "that was my idea" and that gave me a great feeling, being able to personally contribute to a product that would have such positive effects on business’s that deployed it.  I’ve installed EBS countless times during the beta’s and helped find and resolve many issues with it (like the one where it downloaded 10GB of WSUS data immediately after installation that would kill most Aussie internet connections).

At a business level, we’ve invested and were investing more and more into it.  We had a number of our techs train up on it, and play with it even at home.  One of our guys even spent $10,000 of his own hard earned cash to buy a server just so he could virtualise EBS and learn it’s ins and outs.  We’ve had customer discussions about their growth and sold them on the idea that EBS was a natural growth path out of SBS.  We’ve had long term planning discussions with customers and got them budgeting for EBS as their business grows.  Now we need to go back to them and tell them that the products will cost more, and the implementation services will cost more as well.

All this hurts when you find the product is no longer there…

 

What went wrong and what can we learn from this?

I think we can learn a few things from this and hopefully the good people at Microsoft will think about this when they next have a crack at the Medium Business space.

Lack of proper positioning – initially EBS was positioned as the big brother to SBS and I feel that was wrong.  It had the SBS resellers saying it was too expensive, and the medium business customers were thinking it’s too small for them.. Sure once you get past those initial impressions with customers the problems and concerns go away.  You realise that EBS was in fact well suited for the Medium business space.  I believe that Microsoft have more recently however realised this and were set on a better course.

Lack of decent reseller training – EBS is a deep product indeed – and I really don’t think that the depth of training was there for the SMB reseller.  The most you had was a 5 day course on EBS (which was normally run as a 3 day abbreviated course). During that time you had to come to grips with the unique EBS installation method, System Centre Essentials, Exchange 2007, ForeFront Security for Exchange and ForeFront Threat Management Gateway.  Each of those products are deep in their own right.  Therefore it’s my belief that there should have been two levels of course – the first being a course for the experienced IT tech that takes them over the Unique EBS things, the installation process, and the customisations that EBS had done for it.  The second course would be more in-depth on the component products.

Lack of ability for resellers to SELL the product – I honestly don’t believe that most SBS resellers had the knowledge or ability to correctly position and sell EBS.  Most SBS resellers are very focused on the smaller end of the SBS market and they do very well there indeed.  However selling to the Medium Business market is a different beast altogether.  You are selling to the IT manager, not the small business owner.  You are dealing more with budgetary processes that have longer lead times than in the SBS space.  A typical SBS sale can be proposed, and closed in 3-4 weeks, however an EBS sale can be 6 months in the making as you work with a larger business and their processes.  Those things don’t exist in the SBS space anywhere near as much as they do in the medium business space.

 

What can be done to make it better?

I feel that Microsoft have left us hanging for the moment.  We don’t know (aside from the Enterprise level products) what we can provide to our clients.  Microsoft have said that EBS is not needed anymore as there is a move to the cloud…. that being the case they need to clearly communicate this to the reseller channel. They need to provide a solid roadmap NOW for their resellers to enable us to build OUR joint business together.  Microsoft may be our largest vendor in terms of influence on our business direction, and that is certainly something we are thinking long and hard about. 

They need to provide more guidance on how to more quickly install EBS style configurations.  For example, I’ve yet to find some decent guides on how to get SCE up and running quickly and have it tuned the same way that EBS was done.  I’d love to see a guide on how to get SCE up and running and configured in under an hour.  We need similar guides on the remaining components as well.  These will help us continue to service the Medium business space at a cost effective manner and hopefully will not blow out the services installation costs which can cripple a project like this.

They need to provide guidance on how to use advanced features of the products – ie TWWEB is a partial replacement for RWW – but so little is known about it, how to configure it and so on.  We need guides that will show us how to do these things.  The information I’m sure is available somewhere on www.microsoft.com but finding it can be difficult.

 

Final thoughts

My final thoughts on the subject relate to the future for other members of the Windows Essential Server Solutions (WESS) family.  With EBS 2008 dead, there is no longer a family as such… there’s just SBS 2008.  We’re back to where we were a few years back with a single product.

I’ll be watching carefully developments in this space as should you.  Be mindful at all times of what your customers requirements are and ensure that you provide solutions to their requirements – that is after all why you are the trusted advisor is it not?

My concern is that Microsoft are too caught up in trying to compete with others vs making products that suit customer requirements.  I think they need to concentrate on being the flame, not the moth.

 

This will be my last post on this topic for a bit.  Yes I’m still upset, but we need to move on and focus on things that we can use to help our customers make more money and in turn it’s effect on our business models and hip pockets.

Tags: Business Focus, EBS 2008, Rants, SBS 2008
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »

EBS 2008 is dead – long live EBS.

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

With the news on Friday that Microsoft have cancelled EBS 2008, it gives me pause to think.  Let’s look at this from an alternate perspective.

This is now the 2nd time in 10 years that Microsoft has decided to leave the Medium business market without a clear vision for direction.  The last was back in 2001 when Microsoft killed the BackOffice product line which was focused on the mid market space.  Sure it was not as well designed as EBS, but they decided back then that maybe the Medium business space could deal with the normal products, and pay normal prices… So it’s happened again – this time in 2010.

The only real reason Microsoft is giving for this is “The Cloud…”.

You know – I’m not against change at all, I’ve been involved in IT for over 30 years now and accepting change is a reality that we live in – in fact it is the only constant in the industry.  Having said that however, I do have some deep concerns for Cloud computing that I feel are really being glossed over by many including Microsoft.

Let’s look at how it sits in Australia as one example.

Currently BPOS – Microsoft biggest Cloud computing “product” is ONLY available via Telstra – our largest and monopolistic Telco.  So in order to sell BPOS, you need to deal with Telstra.  Telstra is also the organisation that owns the majority of the communications infrastructure in Australia and their pricing is insanely expensive for what you get.

The data centre for all BPOS in Australia is not even located on our soil.  It is in fact located in Singapore – yes – thats right, the data that you have in your BPOS account in Australia actually falls under the laws of the Singapore government.  I talked to Microsoft about this back before BPOS was launched and I was told that “it’s unlikely that Telstra will host this in Australia…” 

In the USA – they have the Patriot Act which allows the US government to seize and control access to information held on computers on it’s soil if suspected involvement in terrorism.  I have no idea if Singapore has laws like this.  I have no idea what Singapore laws might consider is illegal vs Australian laws.  I do know that chewing gum is or was illegal in Singapore at one point and that you could get thrown in jail for having it – therefore what else is different that might cause YOUR data to be at risk.  My point being, is that you just don’t know.  That is a risk to you and your business if you choose this as a solution.

Let’s look at another factor in it.  With on premise solutions, a building fire or flood would knock out that business and it’s data and that is devastating for that business.  In a Cloud computing scenario, what happens to not only YOUR business, but a heap of other business’s in the event that the data centre has a fire or gets flooded?  Couldn’t happen could it?  Well it did happen in Melbourne this last week. What is the economic impact to not only ONE business, but ALL those hosted in this data centre?

I’m not against Cloud computing at all – in fact this website is hosted on virtualised servers that run in a data centre I’ve never been to visit and is a cloud offering.  What I am against however is the marketing of many that the Cloud will cure all the business problems we have and that there is no risk at all in it.  Certainly that is not true.  Certainly that is NOT the reason to kill a product like EBS that I feel held such great potential.

Tags: Cloud Computing, EBS 2008
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Microsoft kill EBS (Essential Business Server)!

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

I learned about this yesterday, but due to NDA could not talk about it until now.  This has been the most frustrating 24 hours I can remember.

At 8am PST Friday March 5th, 2010, Microsoft pronounced dead on arrival their EBS Product Line. This includes both the upcoming release (EBS v2) and the current product EBS 2008.  June 30, 2010 is the last day of sales for EBS 2008 and they have totally killed the next version of EBS v2 which was in development.

Wow…. this is an amazing wake up call for us all.  Here is a product (EBS) that has been in the making for the last 5 years, and only publicly available since November 2008, and now just over 12 months after it’s gone on sale, Microsoft have canned not only it, but all future versions of it.

I don’t know about you, but this scares the shit out of me.  I’ve built my business for years on the SMB space, and just when I thought Microsoft was really starting to understand the needs of the Medium business market, they go an cancel the product. I had an insight into EBS v2 but can’t disclose what was in it.  What I can say was that I was even more assured that the EBS team really GOT IT.  They UNDERSTOOD what the Medium business market needed.  So what do Microsoft do with all this knowledge…. they go and kill the only product they have that suits that market.  They leave current SBS customers with no real viable upgrade path from SBS except to their ENTERPRISE products…

They’ve effectively said that we think that the medium business market can make do with individual server products, rather than an integrated suite like we have with SBS.  They’ve decided that all that marketing over the past few years about how it’s easier to manage multiple servers in your EBS network via one console is just marketing crap and there is no real value in it at all.  They’ve decided that the Medium business market does not need features such as Remote Web Workplace or any of the great functionality that the EBS team have produced.

The people on the EBS team – led by Chuck Archer – they really know their stuff.  I’m saddened to hear that the last 5 years of THEIR HARD WORK has led to this.  Microsoft should be ashamed of itself for this decision.  I really cannot understand the rationale behind Microsoft making this decision.  I’ve been told that “it will be fine, just wait for the next version of Windows server and you’ll see…”  Sorry Microsoft – but that is likely 2 + years away… what do I sell my customers NOW???

Let’s look at this from other perspectives.

What about the partner channel?  EBS has been slow to pickup in the channel because Microsoft really didn’t do a great job of promoting it correctly.  Initially they promoted it as “big SBS” which was plain wrong as it was so much more, and honestly your average SBS reseller is not selling into the EBS market.  That I think was a major flaw in Microsoft logic – believing that any SBS reseller could sell EBS.

Ok – so what about those resellers that were starting to “get EBS” or those that got it from the start?  Where are they to go next?  Well some are just going to seriously loose out on their business.  Personally – I was predicting around $500,000 NEW Revenue from EBSv2 in the next financial year in my reseller business Correct Solutions.  We had around 8 sales lined up already with clients and even today I was due to take an order for for $110,000 of HP server hardware that I had to hold off on until I figure out what the alternate strategy is.  Microsoft – you fail to realise that those of us that have built a business around this and have supported you EVERY SINGLE STEP OF THE WAY are now going to pay the price.

Am I angry… yes.  I’m angry for a few reasons.  I’m angry because I didn’t see this coming.  I didn’t predict that Microsoft would make such a dumb assed move as to kill a product like this that held such great potential.  I’m angry because I believed in my heart that this was winner and I KNOW that customers will be adversely affected by this decision.  I’m angry because I’ve spent a fair bit of my own blood sweat and tears selling this product to our clients – heck we did an EBS 2008 install TODAY and now I have to tell the client on Monday that the product is discontinued.  I’m angry because maybe I drank too much of the Kool-Aid and actually believed in Microsoft.  Yes – maybe I’m the dumb ass in all of this. Maybe I should not be trusting Microsoft with my future or the future of my business.  Microsoft you are making me rethink a lot of things.  I’ve got to say that you will probably make a LOT of resellers do the same with this move.

So, I’ve got to ask one final question…. what next Microsoft?  What dumb assed move will you make next and take us by surprise?

Tags: EBS 2008, Microsoft, Rants
Posted in Blog | 13 Comments »

Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Want more info?

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Tags: EBS 2008
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Servers in the SMB Market Part 2

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Tags: EBS 2008
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

EBS 2008 Documentation Updates & Downloads

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Tags: EBS 2008
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