Microsoft call to drop EBS “like a bombshell”

Small business left stranded

The dumping of Essential Business Server is the latest in a string of SMB products to which Microsoft has shown the door in recent years. One Care, Response Point and Small Business Accounting are no longer in active development.

"Look at the products Microsoft has cancelled in the last two years. The question has to come - what next?" said Correct Solution's Small.

"Microsoft seems to be cancelling more products than they are producing. I am worried that Microsoft is becoming too focused on Google than on their customers."

Small says Microsoft didn't give resellers enough time to understand the sales cycle involved in selling a complex platform like Essential Business Server.

"I think Microsoft stuffed up their marketing when they started it. They pitched it as 'big SBS'," said Small. "They were looking for too long at the 65-75 user sites. Rather they should be targeting the 150 user customers."

He said that unlike selling Small Business Server, Essential Business Server can be a six month sales cycle. Small added that Correct Solutions was used to longer sales cycles from dealing with its SME customers.

"It can be a six month sales cycle," said Small. "We are used to that sales cycle from dealing with SMEs.

"There's certainly a need for it in the marketplace," said Craven. "Just like SBS took 18 months to take off and find the right channel to embrace it and push it, they just needed to wait and find that partner grouping that deals with [mid-sized] business to become familiar with EBS and work out how good it is."

Making alternative plans

Microsoft SMB resellers spoke of their uncertainty in meeting the needs of growing customers.

"We did some work last year to find what is best and made the decision to focus on EBS. I haven't had a chance to do that again," said Hexworks' Jackson. "I figure I'll have a month or two to do that."

Craven agreed that there was nothing similar in the market to Essential Business Server.

"I haven't even got the faintest idea what I'm going to architect in to replace the EBS solution," he said. 

"We can stitch something together using individual Microsoft servers but we would lose a lot of the integrated consoles and Remote Web Workplace. It's going to be a lot more labour intensive and management intensive and difficult to set up.

"It's too early to have really sat down and thought about all the implications of what we've lost."

Craven said he had looked at the Novell Small Business suite, "but that's fairly clunky". Lotus Notes was "not very acceptable" outside of government, he added. "It's not really an email solution of choice."

"It puts us in a pretty invidious situation with our clients. Our clients will say you're a partner, you should have known this and seen it coming," said Craven. "The hard part is going to be telling customers that they have to spend money on it."

Has your business been affected by Microsoft's decision to dump Essential Business Server? Let us know at editors@techpartner.news