Server 2003 Upgrades Slow But No Less Of Opportunity Ahead For SMB VARs

Small-business clients are dragging their feet when it comes to Server 2003 upgrades, but that doesn't mean it isn't still a huge opportunity for small-business VARs.

The looming end of support for Server 2003, which ends on July 15, 2015, was the big theme at the D&H Fall Mid-Atlantic Technology Show in Hershey, Pa., last week, a show focused on opportunities for SMB VARs. Some 1,000 SMB VARs and vendors attended the event last week.

The reason for the delay is that small businesses tend to procrastinate more on major upgrades than enterprises, VARs and D&H executives said. In particular, the smaller businesses also tend to be more frugal and change-averse than their enterprise counterparts, Bill Hersh, solutions coordinator at D&H, said. For example, D&H Co-President Dan Schwab said that the distributor is still feeling the benefits from the end of support for XP and expects the boost to continue through the end of the year, while other distributors not focused exclusively on SMBs have said their benefits already are trailing off.

[Related: D&H Sees Double-Digit Business Growth From XP, Education And More]

"I think there are some businesses that are proactive and want to do it ahead of time, but the smaller the business the more apt they are to hold out," said David Flaim, general manager of Pittston, Pa.-based Computer Visionaries. Flaim said his average client size was between 20 and 30 employees.

However, Flaim said that the experience and "panic" that many small-business clients went through to upgrade their systems earlier this year, due to the end of support for Windows XP, is helping prod them along to be more proactive.

Just like with XP, Flaim said that clients are hesitant to make the hefty investments that are required to bring their systems up to speed, an investment that is even more substantial for Server 2003 end of support. Instead of just upgrading the operating system, the servers, applications and infrastructure might have to be upgraded as well, Flaim said.

Stephen Brooks, president of Edgemont, Pa.-based Penn Systems Group, agreed, including that it affects Exchange, SQL databases and more. The complexity around all of those factors is "significant," Brooks said.

"When we looked at getting people off of XP, this is very different. It requires a different expertise set from the solution provider to identify all those pieces," Brooks said.

Flaim said that he is approaching clients by saying, "Let's do it right and let's do it all" instead of just upgrading the bare minimum. He said that some clients are buying into that and others aren't. However, he expects more of them will agree to it as the deadline approaches and "panic sets in."

"It's human nature," said his colleague Amy Flaim, purchasing manager at Computer Visionaries.

But putting it off means that July will be crunch time for small-business VARs helping their small-business clients make the last-minute move off of Server 2003, Brooks said.

"We're going to be up to our eyeballs in work," Brooks said.

In response to that, D&H has been ramping up its support to resellers, including evaluating solutions options, end-user marketing materials and training. At the D&H show in Hershey, Pa., last week alone, there was over eight hours of training specifically around Server 2003 end of support.

Solution options that D&H is helping its resellers roll out include hardware upgrades, software upgrades, cloud and virtualization, solutions specialists told CRN. VARs said that they are or plan to use the Server 2003 as an opportunity for conversations around all of those types of technologies, as well as discussions and education around best practices.

"From a small-business community standpoint, we believe the onus is on us to help our resellers be successful. We're creating a lot of tools, including end-user marketing, that they can take to their end users to help highlight the risks of not migrating and really the opportunity, more importantly," Schwab said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 10, 2014