Microsoft admits to wasting 2 hours a week on upgrades alone!

OK, Small Business Experts, help me out here! Maybe I am too used to the Foundations server environment where upgrades and recovery takes literally few minutes only. Is this how low expectations are in the Microsoft world?

Please help me understand what Microsoft Essential Business Server Press release is all about,

“We used to spend 15 hours a month doing upgrades,” said Tom Goddard, director of Information Technology for Lee Company. “Instead, with EBS, this is down to two hours a week (That’s still 8 hrs/month). That alone saves us $11,000 per year and allows us to spend more time thinking strategically about our business.” (Microsoft.com PR)

So, let me get this correctly — Microsoft admits that they used to make YOU waste 15 hours a month on upgrades and bug fixes alone, which if you had a good engineered product — would not be there to begin with. Now, with the launch of SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 today, MS folks are happily promoting the fact that the environment will still cost you 8 hours (2 hrs/week x 4 weeks) a month of unnecessary labour and down time in patch fixes.

I am confused. As a small business owner, I am looking for maximum uptime and minimum IT headaches. Small Business owners cannot afford to have downtime, they don’t have backup data centers in place nor they can afford to have in house IT guy to constantly upgrade the darn server.

Should I even talk about the fact that Microsoft’s own case study on Essential Business Server deployment outlines deployment time reduction from 4 months to 1 month. That is right, a month to setup a small business server? Lotus Foundations takes 30 minutes.

Lee Company installed Windows Essential Business Server 2008 in less than one month. “It would have taken us three to four months to deploy the individual programs,” Goddard says. (Case Study Link on Microsoft.com

I am confused. Help me out? Any small business owners and consultants? Please advise. I need to figure this all out. It’s bugging me too much ;)

Here’s what Microsoft guys are saying about Lotus Foundations Server

Great article by a Microsoft-Watch.com site on Lotus Foundations,

IBM is doing what I’ve been saying Microsoft should do more of: Software plus hardware plus services . Hardware is the crucially missing component to Microsoft’s Software plus Services strategy. Microsoft presumes that partners must do the hardware—that it can’t cut them out. IBM’s strategy relies heavily on partners, just in a different way.

I’m conceptually impressed with IBM’s approach here. I say conceptually, having not used the server appliance. IBM tells a compelling story about the combined benefits of its nearly-new Lotus Foundations Server software and hardware appliance. How those benefits pan out—and how well the server-software-services package competes with Small Business Server 2008—is a story with no ending. Yet.

That said, competitively, Microsoft should watch IBM’s small business server appliance package because:

• Office alternative Symphony is bundled along with Lotus Notes.
• IBM cut a virtualization deal with VMware—for businesses needing to run Windows applications.
• A single appliance can be provisioned up to 500 clients, whereas Microsoft’s Small Business Server caps at 75 users and Essential Business Server at 300.
• The business model is more subscription-like, which should appeal to channel partners and customers, particularly in these times of economic uncertainty.
• IBM claims low-touch setup and supporting services (such as domain management and ISV software updates); the server software dials up every 12 hours for these.

It’s the software plus hardware plus services approach that really differentiates IBM’s Foundations appliance—and Microsoft and its partners should really, really learn from Big Blue.

Link to the full article