Stack Wars: SBS vs. Linux

David Overton's Blog : SBS vs Linux - don't take my work for it, listen to Vlad.

There is a good discussion going on over at David’s blog about the use of Linux vs. SBS in the small business arena which links over to Vlad who stokes the fires on the topic with some pretty healthy support for SBS. Vlad offers the opinion that people don’t look hard enough to see the value in SBS and though he doesn’t use the word its really the benefit of the Microsoft “stack”. The beauty of SBS is that much of the stack is in the box which makes it incredible value for money. Now I know you can go get a version of Linux for free and add sendmail or Scalix and then use Open Office or perhaps even commercial software (heaven forbid eh?) from IBM. It will work and I have seen it work but I have also seen the pain to make it work. Let me explain

A few weeks back news.com posted an article titled “Sofwtare’s Stack Wars” and I nearly had a heart attack – my team created and delivered an internal training session with the title Stack Wars back in Decemeber. For a moment I thought news.com had snuck in to our session which would have been a tad worrying. Basically we took a look at how the Microsoft products “stack” together and demonstrated to our colleagues that when you combine technologies like Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003 and Windows Mobile you can create a pretty compelling Flexible Working solution that is secure and manageable. The business benefits of that are that employees can get stuff like email done on the road, communicate using IM and find places with Sat Nav. We basically showed how Microsoft technologies plug together to provide a solution that solves business issues - revolutionary eh? You’re used to Microsoft just pushing product.

The next part of Stack Wars was the interesting bit though. We tried to replicate everything we could show on our own platform using a combination of open source and commercial software. In some areas we were honestly surprised at how good some of the software ws – Open Office and parts of RHEL being cases in point. For the most part though it was a painful process simply to get things up and running to provide the same level of functionality of say Windows Server with Exchange Server 2003 and WIndows Mobile. We tried with Linux, Notes and Blackberry and though you could argue that we would says it’s hard for us it really was – and I think my team of some of the most tech savvy people in our UK organisation. Ultimately, we learnt a lot about competitive software but also our own - the key being that although it’s not perfect it does build together nicely in to a solution. This is precisely what we’re going to demonstrate with the Demo Showcase over the next few weeks.

One final point: news.com warns of vendor lock in and I guess that is something that can be levelled at all of the commercial vendors. To an extent this is always going to be there in my view as this is part of the sacrifice you have to make to get a true solution. However, work like the licensing of the ActiveSync protocol to Motorola, Nokia and others is a sign that this is changing I think. We’ll continue to be pushed my software as a service approaches but again I think there is a compromise there, at least for now between the functionality you can build on the web vs. rich client functionality and other concerns such as data security.