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Facing waning demand for Microsoft products, more than 1,000 Microsoft Business Partners have already signed up to sell IBM Lotus Foundations "office-in-a-box" appliance for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the first five months of 2009. Some of these guys partnered up with IBM right after Microsoft launched Windows Foundation, an attempt to create a skelton box for SMBs which has to be replaced when folks outgrow it.
"Lotus Foundations is a complete, cost-effective solution that easily scales as a business grows. When you add users, you know exactly what it will cost and the functionality you’ll get ," said Bernie Leung of Mesa Technology. "With Microsoft SBS, you always have to worry about what additional licenses you will have to purchase – the SQL client is just one example. "
Microsoft partners are looking for an alternative that provides SMBs with more collaboration computing power for less money and more reliability in these challenging economic times.
"And with Lotus Symphony, we don’t have to pay for Microsoft Office. Most importantly, Lotus Foundations is simple to use and easy maintain. It eliminates the expense of having a full-time IT expert on staff," said Jose Lopez Gonzalez, CEO, Lopez y Cortina, an insurance provider in Monterrey, Mexico.
"If you sell servers to small business or non-profit organizations and you want one that has everything they need to run their network in one box that is extremely easy to manage, you owe it to yourself to look at the Lotus Foundations appliance,” said David Lawrence, President, Smart Technology Enablers.
New IBM clients such as Lopez y Cortina, Murak & Associates LLC and Calvary Baptist Academy are indicative of many small businesses in North America and around the world. For these organizations, who lack the luxury of dedicated IT personnel, keeping expenses in check is a top priority. As such, these companies are looking for ways to make dealing with technology easier.
The following are comments made by a sample of IBM clients and partners who have signed up for Lotus Foundations in the past five months.
Lotus Foundations….dramatically improved our email platform. And instead of using disparate software, every user has the same comprehensive solutions, creating a common experience and standardized security and back-up protection across the company." — Jose Lopez Gonzalez, CEO, Lopez y Cortina
For us, collaboration is paramount. With the VPN and file sharing features in Lotus Foundations, our consultants around the world can access information just as if they are in the office. And with this solution, we know our data is safe. The backup process is completely automated. It’s one less thing for us to worry about." — Gerry Murak. Principal, Murak & Associates .
Our IT setup consisted of a series of old desktop computers. Our file management system consisted of information stored on CDs, disks and hard copies of important documents. We needed a system to help centralize and simplify our file storage, but we didn’t have a huge budget. Lotus Foundations enabled us to implement a complete data storage system and stay within budget. And as an added savings, the included Lotus Symphony software enables us to cut all future costs tied to buying and upgrading Microsoft Office licenses. – Kathy Rutledge, teacher, Calvary Baptist Academy .
"With Lotus Foundations, we were able to get a more complete solution and cut our costs significantly. The full year cost of our Lotus Foundations environment is equivalent to what we paid for only about one-and-a-half months with our SBS solution. That means we can spend more money on developing solutions that help our customers improve the way they do business." — Dr. Tim Miller of EnVision .
This one is too good!
Lotus Foundations is like a giant aspirin for the IT headaches that plague business owners every day." — Greg Gould of GDomino .
"The Lotus Foundations server is a wonderful device – the ease of install and configuration makes getting right to work a quick job. For the money, we could not have come close to finding this functionality anywhere else – enterprise quality in a small business box." — Robert Thresher, owner, Thresher Enterprise Systems .
"With Lotus Foundation remote management, we have eliminated 50% of the support travel time allowing us to grow our Managed Service Provider division. As a result, we have grown sales and our customer base by 80% in the year 2008. With all the technology opportunities today, we are seeing a large number of customers looking for long term solutions outside of Microsoft, and Lotus Foundations and IBM Symphony are two great alternatives that offer small business organizations an IT solution that grows as their business grows – and adds value without taking away from their bottom line." — James Sulfare, Solinkit, LLC .
"Lotus Foundations allows us to service our more than 100 different clients remotely. In fact, of all of the clients we’ve serviced that have IBM servers running the Lotus Foundations, we’ve only ever met two face-to-face. Lotus Foundation’s ease of setup and management allows us to ship out an unconfigured unit to our client. Upon receiving the unit, I have frequently instructed over the phone, the secretary — with zero computer experience – on the setup and configuration of the unit," said Hari Boukis, owner, Advertising Magic .
"We chose Lotus Foundations from IBM for its high availability and ease of maintainability. Lotus Foundations also helps companies keep costs down do to its reliability, all-in-one office software suite, ease of use and maintainability. Additionally, since our solution is Windows-based, the ability to run Windows applications alongside Linux applications makes the Foundations environment a complete SMB solution." — Jim Abraham, Managing Partner, Line Fifty Software.
Lotus Foundations 1.1 gets the lovin’
After the announcement of Lotus Foundations Start 1.1 and Branch Office 1.1 , I purposely delayed writing about the launch as I wanted to gauge community’s feedback on the release. I am very proud to say that Lotus Foundations v1.1 has been a great hit with the partners and our clients. Some of the excerpts for your reading pleasure.
Ray Davies describes it in a short and sweet way,
Lotus Foundations is the best thing since sliced bread if you like bread!
Scott Hooks talked about it at BleedYellow.com .
The release of Lotus Foundations 1.1 finally delivers the ability to add Foundations to an existing Domino environment and/or add additional Domino servers to allow distributed computing, instant messaging, Blackberry, and more. It also adds support for VMWare 2.0, which allows multiple virtual servers, including Windows servers and applications, to be run from one physical server, and supposedly Windows servers can perform better on the Foundations VM than they do natively on Wintel hardware.
This release also allows Lotus 911′s TruePresence add-on for Lotus Foundations to extend all of these capabilities by adding a Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) telephone PBX that is integrated with Notes and Sametime, meaning that you can now run all of your communications tools, including a turn-key phone system, from one easily-managed, self-healing server.
Stuart McIntyre writes,
1) With Lotus Foundations Start 1.1, you get the ability to run not only Linux applications on the in-built Foundations OS, but also any application that runs on Windows or other Linux distributions/appliances. Support for VMware Server 2.0 is provided in both Foundations Start 1.1 and Foundations Branch Office 1.1 so that you can protect your existing appliance investment with an experience that is superior to running applications on a native Windows machine. You benefit from the stability of a Linux-based system while enjoying the ability to support the wide array of Microsoft Windows-based applications. Running Microsoft Windows applications on a virtual machine represents a significant improvement over traditional Microsoft Windows based x86 platforms. (I’m really looking forward to using Foundations Start as a base for Lotus Connections and Quickr deployments now we have this functionality…)
2) Lotus Foundations Start 1.1 supports distributed deployment of Lotus Foundations Start services in multiple locations – an improvement over the single-server model of 1.0. This means that Lotus Foundations Start deployments in two locations can be aware of each other and be able to share data and users between them. Lotus Domino is not a prerequisite for this offering. Secondly, Lotus Foundations Branch Office supports deployment of Lotus Foundations Start as a branch office solution for organisations with existing Lotus Domino infrastructure at the head office. Administration of the Domino server within the branch office can be done following existing processes, and using existing Domino administration tools. So now Foundations can provide your organisation with an easy-to-manage and easy-to-deploy solution for remote offices.
These are excellent improvements to the Foundations product line. If you haven’t taken a closer look at Foundations so far, it’s time to do so.
A quick search on twitter for Foundations 1.1 yeilded few other conversations like,
@stuartmcintyre : @gravescj Completely agree – LOtus Foundations 1.1 is *such* a step forward, it really does make it perfect for so many SMBs
@collabmatters : Just blogged: Lotus Foundations Start 1.1 and Branch Office 1.1 released – now to get Connections on there!
@we4it : IBM hat gestern Lotus Foundations 1.1 freigegeben. Hier die offizielle Ankündigung: http://is.gd/oQg2
@elissachan : Lotus Foundations Start v1.1 and Lotus Foundations Branch Office 1.1 are NOW AVAILABLE..!!
@Africanjoe : IBM Lotus Foundations – not only for very small Companies!
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