> Again, the barriers to entry are huge. Maybe you have > a market for your target as I am way out of touch > with enterprise needs and such (cater to really small > biz). But for the SBS audience, to quote a cliche, > you (or anyone who tries to do this really as many > have already) is fighting an pure uphil battle. All > the research I did at the time a lot of the > alternative solutions did about 75% of what SBS did. > It is that 25% that just seems that can't be caught.
Yes, I believe I have a market to go after, but that's not the important detail. The important detail is my business model: I'm not going to even try to go into a "clicky-bunty" space and compete with Windows. I am going to try and pitch enterprise-grade high-availability and scalability for a mere fraction of the price. My target is to offer servers and services that you never see or hear about because they're the back bone infrastructure, not the front end. The aforementioned "small server/appliance" could potentially fill that space if the infrastructure is designed by someone with HA/enterprise experience (mirroring, clustering, failover, and so on). This is all doable by someone who knows their stuff, and I am talking with Solaris of course. As for Outlook, Outlook *can* be replaced Evolution; this is almost trivial, and does not pose a challenge of any sort. The problem is the back end, to be more precise, the task to solve is integrated calendar, mail and tasks that Evolution can interface to, as well as a web front end for those running on thin clients. I'm obviously talking about a back end solution capable of scaling down (desktop) or scaling up (thin client). Luckily, I believe I have found such a solution. It's called e-groupware and Evolution can be made to talk to it. I also believe that it offers same or better functionality as Microsoft Exchange. > To be 100th of the cost would mean less than $100 as > SBS can be had for $500-$800 for 5-users. This This is definitely doable today, if Solaris could be made to work on the Soekris appliance, it's a done deal. Remember, my model is not based on trying to earn money on the solution. Rather it's based on two models, which are either a yearly support subscription, as in, the customer pays me an amount X per year and I consult for them as much and as often as they need me, or on the "pay as you go" model where the customer pays for consulting only when they need me and how much they need me. I am definitely not going to try and be all things to everyone. My goal is sell consulting services for infrastructure, not necessarily connected to the product at hand, and the solution I'm developing is only the means to get the foot in the door. Because sooner or later, if that little business is sucessful, it will grow and have a need for more and bigger infrastructure. Then they'll be ready to move off of appliances, perhaps at least partially, and I will be there for them to help them transition to bigger things. > I will say right now, focus most of your efforts in > getting Outlook to FULLY work with your box OR at > least major stuff (Shared contacts being top one). I'm not even going to try to get Outlook to work. The solution I'm offering is actually Windows-free, or if the customer insists on Windows, it can be used via a web browser of their choice. That's the future anyway, and has been for the past 20 years, and it's finally time start implementing it out there in the field. The pitch is ZERO costs for software and pay-as-you-go for maintenance, and that's simply not going to be possible with Windows. With Solaris, it is. And the pay-as-you-go model is going to *very cheap* for the customers, so that even your typical "ficus plant, mom 'n' pop" business will be able to afford it. > Also, will your box be able to goto a web url and > pull up Webmail (easy part) BUT also seemlessly do > Remote Desktop to Windows machines through a drop > down menu in the webpage? One could easily setup a Like I said, desktop is not interesting to me at all, and I will not even attempt to compete in that arena. As described above, my solution will be web accessible, of course. I want to offer DNS, web, database, mail and mail filters and file servers that are highly fault tolerant and highly available and extremely cheap, but necessarily easy to work on "under the hood" (i.e. require technical expertise). That's my job, to implement them fast with minimum of fuss and make sure they run and run and run, to the point that people even forget that they even exist. I'm actually not even sure I want to target one or two people businesses. My original idea was to go after small firms of 50 - 1000 people. > Say you do get all this figured out and your box does > a huge majority of the funtions of SBS. MS will just > comes out with more ways in future SBS and/or Windows > versions to ensure vendor lockin. Change the way > Outlook communicates, etc. They have done it before. > Or who will be able to admin it since it will be > Solaris underneath if ever need to touch the > foundation. MS admin/kiddies are a dime a dozen. Like I wrote above, M$ could in that scenario come up with anything they want; but they will never be able to give their product away or compete in price with me, no matter how cheap their product is. And since the customer would no longer be Windows dependent, it wouldn't matter one way or the other what M$ came up with. Remember, backbone. It is not yet time to fight the desktop windmills. First we have to get a really, really huge gun. > The key is to get something that can do everything > SBS can, but do it all on its OWN. Hopefully not > needing Outlook. Only way I can see that is if either > the alternative is browser-centric or a competive > full featured replacement client comes out that can > compete with Outlook on Exchange for features. Exactly! You nailed it. And that's what I'm working on. With Solaris as the back end. And this thing of mine can, in fact, scale to infrastructure capable of serving an entire bank or an insurance company, or, or, or, ... if necessary. I'm building this thing that way from the very beginning. That's where the ideas came from to begin with. Surely a decade of best practices, dos and don'ts, cost-cutting and high-tech can be used to an advantage. > PS I know it sounds like I am a MS troll here > pitching SBS to a Solaris board, but believe me, it > is hard to convey in text but I am just trying to > give my perspective. "board"? You mean this forum? Personally, I believe you have described a very important challenge that does need to be solved and that has a big opportunity. And that's good; we need to be thinking about that kind of stuff. It might not pay much, but the key here is volume and market penetration, which breeds more volume. And as Microsoft has clearly shown, this low-margin volume can bring in huge amounts of financial gains. On the other hand, I believe there is a market for the small guy to profit from enterprise technologies at the fraction of the cost. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
