Gareth Howell

A good question, and one I have been asked by several people. "I thought you were all into SharePoint and Groove now?" said another. Well, yes, to a point.

It's really a matter of economics. I don't care what IBM says, from the perspective of our Company (elastictime), the Notes business is diminishing in the UK. It may well be growing elsewhere, but not here. We're not going to give up on Notes, but we expect it to deliver s smaller proportion of our business over the coming years. Our core collaboration competencies apply equally to SharePoint and Groove, so it makes sense to build our business in that direction.

So, why Foundations?

A number of reasons, some of which are geeky and others of which are business.
In no particular order:

• It has the potential to be an appliance sale. I love appliances and the business one can build around them. They are perfect for the S end of the SMB space because they don't impact on the (non-existent) IT capabilities in the customer.
• It's Linux based. I've been in love with Unix/Linux since the late 70's when I installed it at a previous employer in place of DEC RSX-11 on a PDP-11. My desire was partially satiated by Apple building OS X on BSD, partially by IBM supporting Linux for Domino, but was waiting for something like Nitix.
• It has neat additional features like Intelligent Backup and NitixVault which address the major problems of having IT in small businesses - disaster recovery.
• It can be supported remotely over a VPN
• It's perfect for SMB