Microsoft call to drop EBS “like a bombshell”

Correct Solutions had another eight sales lined up for November, when Microsoft was due to release the next version of Essential Business Server.

"That's half a million dollars of incremental revenue that's gone," said Small.

Correct Solutions came 21^st in last year's CRN Fast50 with 44 percent growth in revenue to $3.8 million.

"We were starting to structure more and more of our business around Essential Business Server, so maybe we stood to lose more than other resellers," said Small, who has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Small Business Server since 2002. "Maybe we drank too much of the Kool-Aid."

"I'm really surprised. It just feels like one of those 'screw the channel' things," said David Jackson, director of Hexworks, a Melbourne Microsoft reseller.

Hexworks had trained and certified its three technicians in the Essential Business Server platform and given feedback on the first version. The reseller stood to miss out on as much as $400,000 in lost business from customers wanting to upgrade from Small Business Server, said Jackson.

"We have a couple of sales in the pipeline, a couple of hundred grand of EBS sales that we were expecting in the next six to 12 months," he said. "We are in the middle of an EBS deployment and we've got another one planned for two months down the track. It's questionable now.

"We're reasonably small. Three of the next four projects we had were going to be EBS," said Jackson. "We'll try to squeeze one in before end of June as an EOL product."

Craven said he also had sales which he now had to put on hold. "I was planning a roll out. I haven't decided what to turn around and tell the client. It's still new days and we have to rethink to work out [how] to replace this," said Craven.

EBS customers facing big services bills

For a limited time, Microsoft is giving customers on its Technology Adoption Program (TAP) free licences for the individual component software in the Essential Business Server 2008 suite.

However, customers won't be covered for the costs in re-configuring servers. The integrated nature of Essential Business Server meant that a full installation could be completed in 40 hours, 12 hours of which was spent setting up servers.

By comparison, "that server set up will take 50 or 60 hours by itself" when moving to individual products, said Small. "Now customers have to work out whether they wish to wear that bill because the services bill is going to be quite big."

Customers also could need to add hardware to cope with individual versions of Microsoft software. Exchange includes five roles that in enterprise deployments would be housed on five servers. In EBS, these roles are pre-configured across two servers.

Resellers in the middle of an Essential Business Server sale were in a difficult position, said Craven. He said the high cost of implementing Essential Business Server meant he couldn't recommend the product to his customers that were growing out of Small Business Server.

"Even if it's (EBS) supported for two years, at some stage that client is going to have to move off the EBS platform onto a standard set of Windows servers," said Craven.

"Even if  the licences are given to them free by Microsoft, the IT costs in that migration are going to be quite expensive and something that the customer will have to bear.

"Also, as EBS is moving into maintenance mode there probably will be no documentation or support or white papers outlining how to do that migration. So that is something that Microsoft partners are going to spend a lot of time testing to get their clients off that platform."

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