Home Forums Discussions General Discussion SBS is dead! Microsoft moves completely to cloud.

What was the prediction? I think more people are on cloud than ever before, but not all of them stuck with Microsoft. Microsoft (probably unintentionally) opened themselves up to real competition in enterprise markets that they previously dominated. AWS vs. Azure, Google Apps vs Office 365. They made people feel comfortable moving their data to the cloud.

Thanks to more aggressive competition and new players in the cloud space (Google Apps for Business, etc.). Prices are way down across the board for basic cloud services. I'd say they're probably at their lowest during this adoption phase where companies are trying to maximize their user base.

For a 5 user office, you can get the same features of SBS standard in the cloud without any additional cost by using the new Office 365 Business Essentials plan. A static IP runs you about $25-30 a month for most ISP's. 5 Users with 365 Essentials is the same price as that and you get all the same stuff (Exchange, SharePoint/OneDrive, and a bonus: Lync/Skype). Server 2012R2 Essentials and 2016 integrate nicely with 365. You don't need a static IP anymore so the cost basically cancels out.

For the 25-75 User (SMB) range, they also see the benefits of reduced pricing with cloud services, but it's still significant. They're pretty used to it by now though. Implementing their own VoIP systems because their seat count is too high. What's another VM? Microsoft is also raising prices for this SMB segment by now requiring core licenses for even Windows Server Standard edition. Luckily workloads that need more than 16 physical cores remain at the upper range of that user limit. Though this mainly affects their largest customers who would use quad processor boards with a single license of Datacenter. It's still not at a point where the SMB market would consider switching platforms. Larger enterprises may have made the move already.

Bottom line: The good news is that the micro/small businesses are enjoying price stability as mentioned above. The bad news is that the SMB segment is continually seeing increasing prices/management costs. They're not getting additional value for their investment.

IaaS still remains a premium service.