Earlier in the year I attended an SBSC partner roundtable down at Reading with Nick King, Technical Product Manager for WESS.
It was a very active meeting with lots of feedback to Microsoft around SBS/EBS 2008 as well as other areas to do with SBSC partners such as BPOS . Nick and Emily took away a whole raft of questions, suggestions and comments around the products themselves, marketing and the launch. I’ve now received the feedback from the meeting courtesy of Emily Lambert and have reproduced it below to share with the wider community.
1. SBS 203 Migration Pains: Partners expressed concerns about the lack of resources to assist with migration and the complexity of the end to end migration process.
a. Actions taken:
· Click through Hands on Labs have been delivered on technet to help walk through the deployment and practice before a real migration - EBS 2008 demos can be found here and the SBS 2008 demos can be found here.
· Hands on labs are in development to also support readiness for migration
· There are a number of sessions on migration available on the partner portal covering migration. We’re also scheduling another migration session in the near future details to follow shortly
2. The Upgrade Value Proposition: Microsoft has more work to do around partner and customer value proposition for SBS reasons to upgrade from 2003 to 2008.
This seemed to be a common theme and as a result we are looking into how we better formulate our value proposition for upgrades. There are a couple of ideas in the pipeline regarding compelling reasons to move from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008, including building some scenarios or promotions to help you initiate an upgrade conversation. Unfortunately I cannot share any more details on this at this stage, but in the meantime, if you have any ideas of what might work here, then please do let us know. Send suggestions to sbscuk@microsoft.com.
3. SBS 2008 Training: Lack of availability of SBS 2008 technical training on the current release version has prevented partners getting trained up so that they can deploy SBS 2008.
Nick has escalated this at a senior level to the partner readiness team at Corporate and has informed me that the final courseware for SBS 2008 is expected to be delivered in June 2009 for SBS 2008 and in August 2009 for EBS. In the meantime all CPLS (Certified Partners for Learning Solutions) channels now have access to RTM code level readiness labs and sessions. This has not been an ideal situation for any of us, but hopefully we have now taken a step in the right direction and courses will be ready for July – in fact you can register for this one now:
44CO120 - M6445 - Implementing and Administering Windows Small Business Server 2008 (4 Days) – London 13th July
This hands-on workshop provides students with the necessary knowledge to plan and implement Windows Small Business Server 2008. Students gain first-hand knowledge on topics such as installing, migrating, monitoring, securing, and backing up data. £100 per delegate.
In terms of training that can help you through the SBS 2008 exam, Nick recommends you use the bitesize courses on the 5W/50 webcast series: http://www.mssmallbiz.com/training/.
4. Pricing: Price of SBS 2008 was a concern – whilst partners would like to sell Open it is at least 20% more expensive than full retail product or OEM. With such a large price difference they have to be fair to their customers and cannot be seen to “rip them off” just because they will get Microsoft Club points etc.
This has been very carefully reviewed by Microsoft and we always investigate the right price point for Solutions for Small Business. From our research it was evident that the increase in price of SBS made up only a small portion of the overall price to the end customer. As we move forward we’ll continue to review the pricing for future versions of the product. For those customers that are looking for a low cost server, the recently launched Windows Server Foundation should suit their base needs.
5. Solutions Pathway: Confusion around what the purpose was for solutions pathway, also concerns that end user discounts are published publicly
The SBS team has taken this onboard and working with the appropriate teams to make changes. Further information will be provided in the future as we look across worldwide feedback and look for a ways of reducing the complexity with Solutions Pathway.
6. Partner Resources: There is a distinct lack of partner resources for SBS 2008 and EBS 2008. In addition, Microsoft need to pay more attention to localising corporate tools and resources as partners feel everything is too “Americanised”, including the free 40 SharePoint Apps.
Nick has escalated this at Corporate level and:
- There is a wider project now in motion to address the WorldWide Partner Portal engine and how we internally filter content down to each country.
- There is a review in place of SBSC content and how more content can be discovered
7. Windows Server Rebate offer: - has not had huge impact on influencing what is sold
Feedback taken on board.
8. The SharePoint Opportunity: Partners are missing opportunities on promoting SharePoint and Windows Mobile opportunities with SBS 2008. Microsoft should do more to help partners understand the opportunity.
Nick and Gareth are looking into what can be done here and identifying any other best practice across the world that the UK might be able to adopt.
9. EBS Launch: Microsoft need to consider putting renewed emphasis behind launching EBS and targeting the right partners - it would seem SBSC is probably not the best channel to launch EBS through and the partners did raise that we should consider having a different partner group that focuses on mid size businesses. In addition, launching SBS and EBS together meant that EBS got 2nd place and it diluted the marketing by launching them together. Opportunity & EBS…
a. Feeling that EBS has a narrow market opportunity
b. EBS difficult to sell due to hardware investment
c. Sun + Virtualised EBS is a good solution on a single server for 50 users
d. Build OCS on top of this
e. Target customers where there is a mess in the infrastructure and where the IT person has not got a good view on what they are doing/ has been happening
We are putting a plan in place to address this and gather some case studies whereby partners are growing their businesses by selling EBS. The aim is to showcase to other partners and help them see the opportunity, as appropriate to their business. Stay tuned for more information.
1. Foundation Server: Microsoft need to provide clarity around Foundation Server – feeling from some the Microsoft have removed a market of SBS opportunity.
Hopefully this was suitably addressed in the meeting and post the meeting. We’re always looking at our investment in SMB and ensuring we create as many options as possible for the SMB segment.
2. Partners would love to have the SPLA type licensing for SBS and EBS without actually hosting on OV Subscription. i.e. Predictable model of costs each month. This would be a value prop on moving to SBS 2008
Feedback has been taken onboard. We’re investigating if this is feasible.
3. OCS is too big for many small businesses – need a simple UC solution that is cost effective. Response Point needs to launch in the UK.
Feedback has been taken onboard.
4. BPOS: Partner are not interested in BPOS as you need +5 users; min spend £50/mo. Issues include:
a. Margins are v low compared to other users to make / break even
b. Reseller has no control over the customer moving partners (work around is that you set yr customer up)
c. ”BPOS is not exciting… Margin way too low”
d. Is Exchange and SPS (not linux); limited in services that can be sold (e.g. cant do scripting)
e. BPOS replaces the managed services; it integrates with Active Directory but only 1 way Active Directory
f. Feeling that ”BPOS” has not been sold to them very well
We understand that we have more work to do around the BPOS value proposition for SMB and have therefore engaged with the appropriate teams to address this. The team in Redmond have taken this on board and are looking at potential solutions that could resolve these issues.
for your customers; Understanding the Microsoft licensing models and how to license your customers’ solutions correctly; 