I really and truly don’t agree with that. I think the answer is coming from someone far bigger than me in this space and frankly I think it will again come down to the issue of cost, not in the eyes of a frugal business owner, but in the advertised price of a similar replacement.

We had a discussion over the weekend that started with “people are complaining that SBS will now need two servers” and I asked “is that complaint only valid because you guys sells disproportionately overpriced hardware to mark up your consulting costs” which ended in “business owners realize the need for the cost of good hardware and cost of downtime is higher than the cost of hardware.”

So here is where we are heading, at least according to me. Reliable wireless bandwidth is here. I happen to be on it right now, its twice as fast and 1/6 the cost of the fixed line / T1. Many places are now getting fiber, etc. Most workers are starting to go remote – working from home, from conference, from hotel, from road, from the office down the street. Meanwhile, energy costs are going through the roof and Microsoft licensing isn’t coming down either.

The cost of infrastructure is going through the roof while the cost of having it hosted is trending towards $0.

I don’t think SBS / EBS stands a chance. I also don’t think the Active Directory and Microsoft desktop management are going to be viable in the future because we don’t have pretty little offices with PoE running around, a server room, two geeks to keep it alive, etc… when it can be purchased alacarte, on demand, scalable and affordable.

The marketplace changed. Yes, there will always be opportunities in the infrastructure design for people that need it, but it will be coming at a much higher premium because the talent required to manage that complexity will far outpace the savings from the consolidation. Remember, even though SBS 2008 is dead easy to manage, you aren’t exactly going to click on two buttons to go from SBS 2003 to 2008 – or 2012 or whatever is next.

There will be infrastructure opportunities, but they will be diminishing. My company will focus on catering to the growing demand for the reliable and scalable cloud stuff and my differentiator is that unlike Google and Microsoft, I offer SLA and support. The old cost of downtime in infrastructure is being replaced by the cost of support line wait time with India – and thats why you pay more to deal with me.

To be honest, it has been paying off far better than infrastructure, 2 years running.

-Vlad

So all Infrastructure products are not such as well WEBS 2008 will continue strongly is some markets.

Didn’t mean that in the cloud providers can’t be flexible to take some of the market where “Security and Trust” are manadated but not many are as agile as OWN / Exchange Defender.

As I’ve mentioned, we’re addressing this by putting our servers outside USA to comply with local laws.

For those non-Star Wars fans; which by the way, you will go to Hell for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lando_Calrissian