Yankee Group Analyst says Microsoft SBS Rules

There's a great article over at techweb that references a Yankee Group analyst on the great success of SBS 2003. This is great news for SBS consultants and resellers as well as Microsoft Partners!

We all know that SBS is awesome and now it's pretty much out in the open. 2 Concerns that have been mentioned time and again by Microsoft Partners has been 1. Licensing and 2. Advertising.

Microsoft indeed needs to simplify or rework the licensing a bit. Perhaps even a package that has 10, 25, 50 licenses out of the box for a reduced fee might be the answer...it would at least be a little simpler for the end user.

Microsoft Partners have been really heralding the other item and that is advertising. It's such a great product but we've still got a huge installed base of regular SMB customers that use plain old Windows Server and Exchange Server because consultants and end users don't know any better. Microsoft put some of that $$$ to use and do a real targeted SBS campaign with a direct link to either certified SMB SBS partners or Certified Microsoft Partners (yep TAZ Networks is in this class :) ) or a consultant directory for SMB's to easily see who to call for SBS. Let's really knock em dead in the next 2 years.

As far as the right place at the right time, I think that's a little bit of an oversimplification. It's because of great SBS partners and consultants and the tight community of knowledge and support we have with the newsgroups and Yahoo groups that have really pushed this product and reduced all of the uncertainty and doubt of running everything on one server.......Now if only I saw some of that hard cold cash they're talking about I'd be happy! Which reminds me I've got some advertising to do.