Ubuntu for Small Offices and Home Based Businesses

[feravolo]

I thought it would be a good idea to start this thread, since this is a wide open market for Ubuntu. Small in this case means a business that has one or more employees and gross revenue of less then ten million dollars.

Instead of dwelling on the fact that they have already paid for MS-Office and Windows, point out the fact that they are expected to pay again and again for those products.

For example they can save a whole bunch of money by upgrading to Ubuntu and open Office, instead of Vista and Office 2007. Also that Ubuntu plays well with Windows and you can keep those other Office applications on a windows machine and access them from Ubuntu using RDP or VNC clients. Vino (VNC) servers will even work on the Home Editions of XP, that don't support Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

As a bonus; Ubuntu can also provide all the functionality of Windows 2003 enterprise which has a $2500 price ticket. For that matter it can also provide the benefits of exchange, share-point and SQL server all of which could push the price tag up to $10,000 or more including client access licenses. That doesn't include spending an average of $500 per workstation for MS-Office, and what about anti-virus and all the other little applications. That's all lot of money to spend every three or four years when a major upgrade is released.

These are just some of the good reasons to start using Ubuntu in any business with one or more employees.

Mike

[rufius]

I'm interested in how we can also help market commercial hardware to them as well. I know that small businesses try to save money but hear me out on this one!

I'm a huge supporter of Sun Microsystems and their hardware. I've used Sun hardware in several installations at small businesses and have truly enjoyed working with it. That said here's my thoughts:

I believe that if a small business is looking to host say a database, low-traffic webserver, and mail server, there's no better choice than the Sun Fire T1000 Cool Threads server. The last business I worked for upgraded to these and saved a boat load of money on their electricity bills.

For those of you that don't know much about the servers, they come in several models, the base model being 4000 dollars before TT&L. The processor, a UltraSPARC T1, has either 6 or 8 cores, running 4 threads per core. They run at around 1.0 to 1.2 GHz and manage heavy loads incredibly well. Despite slow clock speeds, the 6/8 cores and 4 threads per core comes out to a beefy 24 or 32 concurrent threads. With that many concurrent processes, its obvious how powerful this server could be for webserving and mailserving.

Investing 4000 in a Sun T1000 will save electricity and money for small businesses since they'll only need to run the one server in order to have mail, web, and database serving all in one tiny 1U setup. Imagine the electricty you save.

A final note is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is one of two Linux distrobutions fully certified for these servers so it seems ideal that we back them since they have such a great power per dollar ratio.

What do you guys think we can do with this?

[feravolo]

It's interesting to know that Ubuntu runs well on Sun's hardware, although Solaris is not a bad "real UNIX" operating system. I agree that Sun makes fine hardware and also has made great contributions to the Open Source Community.

However keep in mind first people have to understand that they don't have to pay to use software, before you can introduce them to hardware that they didn't know existed. The only thing harder to find in a computer store then something that is Windows, is something (other then apple) that isn't a PC. Try to find a SPARC-Station at big box retailer or mega electronics store, but that's okay you are going have trouble finding Ubuntu there too.

People have been "sold" on paying for software and need to learn that you don't always "get what you pay for", especially when you are talking about software. On a lighter note; All the bad press Vista is getting should help the open source community, once the average person finds out there is an open source community.

Peace

[loserboy]

good timing on this thread.

While I do want to tell people about ubuntu being a viable and most likely a better option for small business, I think one important thins to understand is that (at least in my case), most people don't even know how much more ubuntu can do and how much easier it can do it.
There is alot of focus on the fact that ubuntu can do many of the same things (i.e openoffice, wine),
there doesn't seem to be much with entire business solution layouts that windows wouldnt be able to accomplish nearly as easily.

I'm gonna give my situation as a example, but please note that im very much a novice.

I currently sell sell generators that I import, but soon I will be manufacturing them and I plan on running our entire system on linux. I just recently found out that for our needs and projected 3 years we can use ubuntu and decent desktop as a file server or any type of low traffic server, many people don't know that (hopefully I'm not the only one anyway), and I think alot of small businesses need to know that because they might not have any IT people.
Also it's very discouraging when small business owners that use Quickbooks or similar for accounting are refered to gnucash, please don't tell people gnucash is an alternative. But I have found a great alternative, Mybooks. It's commercial software, but in the big picture there is still a huge savings. the company also has software solutions for different types of businesses, inventory control, barcode support. Anyway I don't mean to drag this out but my point is, when you recommend ubuntu to someone, be ready to give them an entire solution and don't just stop at openoffice. hope I didn't get too far off topic there.

I was also thinking about talking to the forum team to ask if they would make an "Ubuntu small business solutions" area, so that things like this could be discussed.

[Swab]

I was also thinking about talking to the forum team to ask if they would make an "Ubuntu small business solutions" area, so that things like this could be discussed.

I second that.

[feravolo]

I could be wrong but anyone can start a forum thread, I choose to start this one here since our business is located in Florida and would like to hear from other people from our state.

There is a marketing team for Ubuntu if anyone is interested, all you have to do is sign up if you are interested about spreading the good word about Ubuntu. Since that is what our business is about is to work with people to move away from pay per seat software and that other operating system.

For people that don't have any experience in sales, I will let you in on a little secret: If you want to sell something and selling Ubuntu is what we need to do like it or not to get it out there. Don't say anything bad about anything, that includes not only the product but also the competing products. This doesn't mean that you hide anything or mislead anyone, you are just trying to make them want to use Ubuntu.

Our organization is staffed by members of computer systems and software engineering professional that work with people to meet both their present and future computing needs. The greatest benefit from Ubuntu is both to eliminate the need to pay for upgrades and to extend the life of existing computing hardware. This means that Ubuntu can save people money [ on hardware] right now and [ on software upgrades ] well into the future.

Ubuntu plays well with windows and there is no reason not to keep it around if it's already paid for. If people really need to use windows for some specific application or set of applications. Ubuntu includes terminal services clients that support Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Vino (VNC) which can be configured on any version of Windows since NT 4.0. Allowing them to access the windows based machines from systems running Ubuntu.

The question is: What applications can be migrated to Ubuntu, for the greatest cost savings? Office productivity applications are the obvious choice, since most offices have more people using word processors, spreadsheets and presentation graphics applications then keeping the books.

If a business needs to run web based applications or web services, more then likely they are running on a system the runs Linux.

The bottom line is that: We are not about being anti-anything, iWe are just about being pro-Ubuntu!

Peace
Mike Feravolo
Cocoa Beach

[loserboy]

I could be wrong but anyone can start a forum thread

Yea, I just meant they should have a section for it, not just random threads.

[dbqp]

Also it's very discouraging when small business owners that use Quickbooks or similar for accounting are refered to gnucash, please don't tell people gnucash is an alternative. But I have found a great alternative, Mybooks.

Is this the only accounting program you have found that works well with Linux? Looking for a great open alternative...

[dbqp]

^

Nevermind! After searching, I found this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ght=accounting

dbqp

[loserboy]

glad you found something