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The difference between IBM and Microsoft in SMB space

by Bilal Jaffery on December 18, 2008 · Comments

in IBM,Lotus Foundations,Technology News

Foundations is taking a different approach….

Instead of dictating what a small business owner should do, at IBM Lotus Foundations, the emphasis is on making sure that our technology fulfills the needs of the small business. We have been listening to the small businesses and understand that traditional Microsoft dominant solutions aren’t working for the SMB market – especially in today’s dynamic and vulnerable environment.

As we have previously seen, Microsoft expects a small business owner to withstand downtime, spend extra on IT and still be forced to just be OK with mediocre way of doing things. Even in the press release, they were proud to showcase that they have reduced downtime to 8 hours a month! C’mon, are you kidding me? Small business is going to focus on their business, not figure out why the server needs a patch again. It should be automated and intelligent process.

IBM has been listening to the SMB market for a while now and have developed the platform according to the needs of the SMB market.

Check out the Press release here: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/ibm/36494/


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Tagged as: foundations, press release

  • Thanks Kenneth for your comments.
  • kenneth cavanaugh
    Hi,

    I love Nitix. The Nitix operating system is like the Ole black telephone. It is simple to operate and robust, even under unusal circumstances it simply works.
  • Christian Tillmanns
    Russian spam? You need a domino blog template. Would be appropriate in your position, don't you think?
  • As the blog gets popular, it gets lots of spam bots attacking it too.

    The reason to stick with Wordpress is due to SEO/SEM abilities and customization that I am used to (from my other projects that I work on). Helps me keep fresh on PHP/XHTML sides of things as well.

    Although, I do plan to launch another blog based on domino platform. Keep eyes open in 09.
  • @3, yes, besides the support point of view, you are allowed to run custom apps on foundations.

    In fact, take a look at ISV toolkit that is available for partners to package their applications on the platform.

    Regarding other comments, as Scott Hooks mentioned, that will be available shortly. It was already in Nitix, its just that code had to be re-worked for Foundations.

    Stay tuned folks! Love the feedback!
  • Site to site replication is critical even for small businesses. They have the need for a multiple servers environment especially for failover. For us that is a major criticism of Lotus Foundations Start.
  • Scott Hooks
    @2: Yes, Nathan was being sarcastic, pointing out that Foundations does not yet allow you to replicate the Domino server with another Domino server (or migrate to it from an existing Domino server), YET. I have been assured that they are working on that for 1.1 though.
  • Its OK Lars, Nathan was being ironic, its usually left to us brits !

    While I'm on though a quick question for Bilal, are we allowed to run custom apps on foundations yet ?
  • olufsphere
    @1 - except of course if you're in a place where bandwidth is a limited resource.

    Site-to-site replication still offers strong asynchronous functionality, and you can easily imagine - especially in a SMB context - apps that doesn't rely on real-time synchronization, much like traditional batch flows on other platforms.
  • "Instead of dictating what a small business owner should do, at IBM Lotus Foundations, the emphasis is on making sure that our technology fulfills the needs of the small business."

    Unless that small business has more than one location in need of a server. If that happens, they should never, ever be allowed to actually share applications. Even though we've built that right into the native platform for the last two decades -- in the SMB space, nobody needs site-to-site replication.
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