Getting trendy
As a result, opportunities abound, but only if the channel is up to speed on contemporary trends playing out in the SMB servers' space.
"There are certainly a lot more solutions out there for SMBs," Fujitsu's national sales manager products, Julian Badell, said. "I think SMB requirements are very similar to what they have always been. What we are hearing from SMBs is when they look at IT they want us to keep it simple, keep it reliable and keep it secure; pretty straight forward requests, really.
"It's important to remember SMBs don't typically have a dedicated IT department in their organisation so they are really looking to the reseller to be that department. When SMBs are looking for features in a product the first feature they are looking for is support, the second is support and the third is support. Support is absolutely key to them."
In order to address the increasing demands of SMBs while retaining ease-of-use, many vendors have taken to bundling solutions. Since late 2007 servers with added capabilities like virtualisation on the motherboard are now common among most vendor SMB offerings and many are taking on an almost plug-and-play feel.
"That's very important for SMB," Badell claimed. "The build it yourself model is perhaps complex. To keep it simple we try and integrate whatever software, installation services and product we can onto it [the servers] or we recommend resellers do that."
Microsoft is also bringing out the new Windows Central Business Server 2008 - which has three products; one for home offices, one for small businesses and one for organisations up to 250 PCs - with the aim of providing simplification for both resellers and users. It will also be offered as part of bundled solutions with vendors like HP.
"For small business the main trend is around simple, affordable computing," HP ProLiant product marketing manager, Deke Rayner-Harvey, said. "We've seen a lot of small businesses go down that 'my first server' approach. The bundled approach is very strong. We've been doing that for around six years now and it continues to show growth for us.
"That's the key focus of the SMB space; to simplify it and not to make it to a level where it is dumbed-down but not beneficial."
Ease of use
In fact, every vendor claims ease-of-use as a characteristic of their products while additionally trying to differentiate. For NEC a focal point is fault tolerance. Its SMB offerings aim to avoid failure by including two servers in one; running two CPUs, two lots of memory, two hard drives and two separate motherboards all in the one server.
"If you look at what users are using today and their reliance on systems today that is going to grow - their reliance on the server is going to grow," NEC's Pepin claimed.
Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, pushes the hot swappable attributes of its system and remote management.
"SMBs don't have a dedicated 24 by 7 IT department so they have an administrator that would occasionally like to have a social life as well," Sun product marketing manager, Sam Tan, said. "Being able to have complete remote management means the guy can be at home, login remotely and fix what he needs to without having to drive all the way into the office."
Conversely, at IBM it is all about blades with their SMB offering.
"You'll see more adoption of blade technologies like the BladeCentre S that we launched last year where you can consolidate server and storage in the one chassis," IBM system X sales manager, Steven Tong, claimed. "This will ultimately simplify small business IT infrastructure within a manageable environment."
