11.04.09
Posted in Work at 12:38 pm by JohnB
Microsoft’s BPOS Suite has come on quite a journey since it’s difficult birth. I can remember the reactions from the hosters I work with when the product set was announced. It ranged from outrage “They’re in competition with us!” through disbelief to a very simple “Meh, we provide other stuff with they can’t.”
Today’s announcement that the pricing for BPOS is being dropped and the mailbox spec increased is surely going to cause more growls and shrugs. The simple fact is thought that Microsoft tried over and over again to place Exchange Server, SharePoint and OCS into the hosing space through it’s partners and it simply didn’t take off the way that it should have done.
There are as many reasons (or excuses) for this as there are HMC – the MS hosting solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration – partners out there, but the main ones are simply that the product was never positioned by any partner the way that Microsoft has positioned BPOS and that the investment in making it easy for the customers was almost totally missing.
BPOS customers are able to migrate their users, groups, contacts and mailbox contents onto the hosted platform with little deep technical knowledge being required. They can also elect to keep some mailboxes locally if they need to.
The release:
New Pricing Announced for Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)
Over the last few years we have seen demand for hosted software applications rapidly increase. Due to the success of our online services (Business Productivity Online Suite) we have decided to reduce the price in order to continue to deliver a competitive and compelling offer that will help to drive continued customer adoption. In addition mailbox storage has now been increased from 5B to 25GB.
From 3 November 2009 the new price structure for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite is as follows:
| Offer |
Original List Price |
New UK Price |
| BPO Standard Suite |
£10.04 |
£6.71 |
| Exchange Online Standard |
£6.69 |
£3.35 |
| SharePoint Online Standard |
£4.85 |
£3.52 |
| Office Communications Online Standard |
£1.67 |
£1.34 |
| Live Meeting Standard |
£3.01 |
£3.02 |
Let’s take a look at one of those prices in particular: Exchange Online.
With these price releases organisations can now get an Exchange Server 2007 mailbox – with a built-in upgrade path to Exchange Server 2010 – for £3.35 per user, per month. Take a look around the hosters and see what the pricing is… really. Then have a think about the cost of a new server, the OS and Application licenses, the backup tapes / disks and the administration resource and tell me it makes sense to run Exchange yourself as a business who’s core competencies are NOT technology!
And to the hosters out there who are, today, throwing their arms in the air and screaming betrayal; you had the opportunity over the last 3 years to develop a significant business offering your own BPOS solution and put yourselves in this position but you didn’t, you put an Exchange Server logo on your web site and sold the TECHNOLOGY not the SERVICE. If you don’t have a migration plan for new customers then you are simply saying you don’t actually care about their needs.
I’ve been banging on about this stuff for quite a while now and it seems that the proof is finally coming to roost.
1. Do it first
2. Do it best
3. Do it cheapest
Those are the keys to making money in hosting. If you can get a combination then it’s pretty much a cast-iron guarantee.
If you’ve simply built an HMC platform, created some plans and then marked up your SPLA pricing thinking you have a solution you’ve missed the point, significantly and now MS are making it for you.
To Hosters
You have a choice now, provide your Exchange products as a value-added part of a larger solution like ERP, CRM or the like, position your solution against BPOS with good, solid business support and services, OR resell BPOS and make a solid recurring referral fee. It’s really become that simple
To Businesses
Give your TCO a serious look. BPOS now offers a significant benefit in both technology and financial terms as an alternative to running your own systems. If you believe you have a more difficult technological issue to overcome then talk to a Systems Integrator (like Planet Technologies of course!) who will be able to not only identify how your systems can be structured but also how ‘Cloud Services’ such as BPOS can and should be leveraged for your business and help you to migrate, quickly and easily, to BPOS if you make that decision.
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06.10.09
Posted in Home, Work at 4:03 pm by JohnB
It’s been a while since I felt the urge to share my desktop life with the world. It’s been a busy old 6 months, new technologies and solutions are bubbling up to the surface and keeping on top of them has been a challenge in itself, let alone actually doing the jobs I’ve got to do.
I made a decision a few weeks ago that if I was going to be espousing the benefits of Cloud Services, as well as assisting businesses with understanding how to take advantage of them in their various different guises, I should really see what it’s like to be a small-scale consumer of these things and I set out to make MY life as easy as possible using the technologies associated with The Cloud.
Virtualisation is the main hanger for these service. Virtualised storage means access from anywhere – in theory. Virtualised machines provide portability and flexibility. So here is my situation.
I use Macs as my workstation of choice, there are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say that I can do what I want and need to do with ease. There are however a couple of items which mean I also need a PC- read Windows – environment to work within:
1) Visio – I do systems architectural diagrams and exchange these with others
2) Project – Project plans need to be built and shared
3) Groove – As a virtual team we use Groove for shared document library storage and for projects
These applications are not available for the Mac – Boo Hiss MacBU in Microsoft! I know that there are alternatives around which will read file formats etc, but the important thing is that I exchange these with others and I’ve not found a ‘clean’ conversion which works both way in any of the options. Groove is simple Windows only.
My adopted solution is to use Parallels Desktop for the Mac and run a virtualised PC o take care of ‘that side of things’ in my working life. now this has been fine for many months and I actually run the PC off a Firewire connected portable drive so I can use it on my iMac at home and my MacBook when on the road; a nice solution as far as it goes but there is still a catch. My data lives on that Windows PC image. If it goes, it’s gone.
This would be bad in a number of ways, all of which are, I’m sure, clear to all. YES! I could take regular backups, but that is mitigation not resolution I needed to be more portable and more de-risked. My solution is a Cloud Service: Microsoft Live Mesh.
The Mesh allows me to publish a folder structure and subscribe to it from many devices including Mac’s natively, updates are made through the Mesh to all of the devices and things are kept up to date. I no longerneed to carry data around with me. But if we think about it, that means I actually no longer need to carry my Windows PC around with me either, I just need access to one wherever I am.
A new virtual PC was created on each of my device ‘locations’ and was added to my Mesh, now with the right aaplications installed and my Groove workspaces also synced, wherever I am I have access to my data. The Mesh also lets me access my library via the web so if I’m guesting on someone else’s PC for an hour I can still work (No Groove, but.. well… a move to Mesh for the team seems VERY likely!). It’s also worth noting that our email service at Planet is hosted, another Cloud service, so it also follows me around or is accessible via OWA.
I should also mention that my new virtual Windows PC’s are running the Windows 7RC. As I write this, I have a Mac running OSX Leopard with Parallels running Windows 7 AND a Windows XP virtual machine too (Groove syncing!!) and eveything is right with the world. I can leave me desk go to another location and have EXACTLY the same functionality, data and access without carrying anything other than my login details This makes me happy.
And things seem to be moving along nicely too. I read with GREAT interest the updates coming to OSX with the Snow Leopard release, in particular the inclusion of Exchange server support in the OS! As quoted from the Apple site “something even Windows PCs don’t have”.
But I am a multi platform user and I have to say that Windows 7 DOES seem to work… on the whole. I’m aware that it’s RC and that there will be a few niggles so I’m living with them for now, but those aside, it’s reasonably speedy (remember I’m running virtualised too) and easy to use. Having bypassed Vista, my XP tuned brain is re-learning how to do things, but it’s not too bad! Niggles a around file extension handling – especially with Groove!!! – and the way it sometimes provides a little too much technical info about a file type. The apps work well and I’ve not broken anything yet.
Anyway, think about the Cloud but not as a distant goal for corporate strategy, think of it as something hat, with a little planning can free you from the constraints of 1 system, 1 OS and 1 location, wander free and be productive for now is the time!
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09.12.08
Posted in Work at 2:13 pm by JohnB
SaaS (Software as a Server) and S+S (Software plus Services) are key elements to Microsoft’s current strategy. It’s important to remember here that beneath everything else that goes on, Microsoft is a software house and makes its money from software licenses. But how effective have they been at delivering their applications in a SaaS or S+S model? The answer is, unfortunately, not very.
Microsoft have poured extraordinary amounts of marketing dollars into positioning Exchange Server as an SaaS platform and the result has been that the majority of hosters who have implemented the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) solution – this incorporates the delivery of Exchange Server in a stuctured architecture – have seen less than stellar returns on their investments. The reasons on the whole for this are that the type of customer which the majority of hosters have see email, even ‘business class’ email, as a commodity rather than a value service and as a result are reluctant to pay for it. Even the much vaunted mobility eneblement is not a key decision point as the majority of email enabled mobile devices support IMAP and when paired with an IMAP client at the desktop and a web-mail interface at the server provide email anywhere.
In the case of Exchange its value lies in its integration with and support of larger solutions as a value-add, not as a product itself.
Microsoft has seen the relative failure of this product and solution in the market sector serviced by the smaller hosters and, in an effort to see off the ever-growing threat of Google’s Apps suite, have done it themselves. The positioning of the Live solutions are questionable and have caused some considerable consternation amongst the hosters who have implemented HMC based on the guidance and advice of Microsoft’s marketing engine. But the rationale is clear, Microsoft’s solutions and applications MUST be available via the internet. The problems of adoption however are not even the most serious ones, they lie within the organisation itself.
There are organisations, business units and product groups within Microsoft who have very clearly defined targets in terms of market share and revenue etc and also in terms of where that revenue comes from.
So imagine a scenario whereby an opportunity exists to exploit the cresting interest in SaaS and S+S but the Microsoft product group for that particular application have no revenue targets from hosted solutions, only from ‘traditional’ sales. They are positioned, in the interests of their own internal sucess, to dismiss the hosted solutions and the SaaS/S+S model and to actively persuade their partners that the traditional on-premise implementations are better.
From the perspectives of the product group this makes sense of course, why would they spend any money on promoting a solution which effectively erodes their ability to deliver against their targets. But this position is dramitcally undermined when seen from any other perspective. The product is, after all, the same so why should it matter how it is consumed?
It is especially frustrating for the Microsoft partners who are pressing for the adoption of the applications under the S+S model to be told “We think it’s a great idea but we don’t have budget to support that this year.” THIS YEAR! This is the internet we are talking about here… in a years time we’ll have all moved on and done something more interesting, yet we see the high level marketing and listen to the strategy presentations where Microsoft is all about flexible delivery, SaaS and S+S and partnerships.
So here’s the thing, I have a program all laid out just waiting for someone to fund which will bring together hosters, partners and the various pieces within Microsoft to establish a solution for this. It’s not rocket science it’s just common sense, and who knows we may even be able to deliver products out to the customers at the end of it!
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