Re: IBM investment in i

Aaron Bartell wrote:

I wonder if the box would be more saleable if a vendor would
pre-build/pre-ship it will a collection of off the shelf open source
applications? For instance, they could load OpenBravo for ERP purposes (
http://www.openbravo.com/), Alfresco for ECM (http://alfresco.com/),
SugarCRM for CRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com), setup a linux partition to be an
email server, Joomla for creating an easy to maintain web presence.

That was tried by IBM a number of times.

It was a failure for the most part due to the solution choices.

I won't mention the choices but they were certainly not
geared toward the small business.

Remember the box with a yellow stripe ???

I know there are many here who support the open source
software and it does have it's place, but when selling to a
small business, they want the whole ball of wax which
includes detailed support and all the manuals that go
with the software.

A small business would have very little tolerance for
"bugs" and how to fix them in an open source situation.

I think that the support issue would be the big show stopper
for most.

It's not a bad idea and it's basically what BP's have
been doing for many years. The major revenue source
for all BP sales was/is the software. To sell boxes with
"free" software would require a shift toward selling support
similar to the "Red Hat" business model.