For start-ups, BizSpark and Microsoft StartupZone enable entrepreneurs to access the development tools, advice and exposure they need at a time when they are most valuable and least affordable—during their first three years. But BizSpark isn’t just a program to make software available. Of course, it does that, but it’s really a partnership with the entrepreneur community. Almost 2,000 organizations worldwide – banks, government agencies, incubators, hosters, lawyers, universities – are the folks who enroll their startups in BizSpark. You can find profiles of just a few of those BizSpark Network Partners here, under the “featured Partners” tab.
We chose to work with such a wide range of organizations simply because they work with startups directly, and they represent the complex elements of each local software economy. In many cases we already have working relationships with those organizations, so why not strengthen them? Where we didn’t already have a relationship, this is a way to build one.
Now we are starting to see those organizations develop new relationships with each other: Hosters are offering discounted hosting services to young companies; lawyers are offering free or reduced cost legal services; accounting forms offering financial training; banks offering loans.
This feedback is guiding our plans for how we’ll build on BizSpark over time. For example, in Europe, we’ll be integrating BizSpark with EUGA – the European Union Grants Advisor – which helps startups get EU grants in 27 European countries. Grants are ‘seed capital’ for early stage businesses – and by connecting Europe’s startups with EUGA, we can help them get that capital when they need it most.
Initiatives like this also strengthen the larger community:
• Seed capital accelerates the success of the start-ups they bet on and mitigates risk for follow on investors
• It delivers national and EU funds directly to the people who need them
• It complements the early-stage support that incubators provide small companies
We’ll keep BizSpark’s offers up-to-date of course, with new releases, as well as brand new technologies like Azure, but we’ll continue to expand our support and partnership with the entrepreneur community, globally and locally.
Yesterday’s post, BizSpark 101, discussed why we developed BizSpark, what’s in it, how to get it and the key BizSpark roles: Microsoft Champs, Network Partners, and Startups. Today I’ll go into a little more detail on how it works, why we designed it that way and what we’ll change in the near future. The roles and rules are simple: BizSpark Champs can enroll Network Partners or startups; Network Partners can enroll startups. So far, two and a half months after launch, about 70% of startups have been enrolled by Network Partners, and that percentage is increasing. Anyone who works with startups can become a Network Partner by enrolling here and signing this agreement. There are now about 1,000 BizSpark Network Partners worldwide. They vary in in size, scope and business set of organizations, including university incubators, government agencies, investors, consultants, influential bloggers and banks. Most choose to publish their profile on the BizSpark site, and you can see them by selecting a country name here. Some examples: TiE, IFJ Institut für Jungunternehmen (Switzerland), Suzhou International Science and Technology Software Park (China), Lgilab (Israel) and the Association of Shareware Professionals. We chose to work with such a wide range of organizations simply because they work with startups directly, and they represent the complex elements of each local software economy. In many cases we already have working relationships with those organizations, so why not strengthen them? Where we didn’t already have a relationship, this is a way to build one. Startups can enroll in BizSpark by contacting a Network Partner or a Champ. In either case, the process is the same: the Champ or Network Partner provides the startup an invitation which includes a a link to the enrollment site and a unique code. The startup signs the agreement, and provides basic contact information, and gets a code to access to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) download site. It can take a couple of hours for the registration to show up in MSDN, but when it does, the software is available for download. We tried to make the process as simple as possible and also to engage the community. I’ve uploaded a more detailed workflow here. The system works well, and we are getting very good comments from users. It’s not perfect though. After a couple of months of operation, we’ve found some areas we want to improve.The workflow connects three roles -- startup, a Champ, and a Network Partner -- with two systems -- BizSpark and MSDN -- and most errors occur when one of those elements is unresponsive. It doesn’t happen often, but Champs or Network Partners occasionally overlook enrolment requests, leaving startups frustrated. The registration delay between BizSpark and MSDN can also be confusing. An upcoming release will bring a lot of improvements in the user experience, including fixes to both these workflow problems.
The debate over IBM vs Microsoft collaboration market share flared up again. IBM issued a press release ahead of Lotusphere that claims significant market share gains for Notes and Domino.
Early versions of the press release also included this statement: "While marketshare estimates vary, Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 indicates a 40 percent share worldwide for Lotus Notes , compared to Microsoft's 48 percent for Exchange, a narrowing gap."
Tom Austin at Gartner rebutted that conclusion and IBM removed it. Tom was quoted in Network World:
I don't believe that in either revenue or user seat share, that IBM is closing the gap [with Microsoft]," Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst, told Computerworld today. "The gap is getting bigger and bigger."
IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
…
Early versions of the press release also included this statement: "While market share estimates vary, Gartner Dataquest's most recent report from 2008 indicates a 40% share worldwide for Lotus Notes, compared to Microsoft's 48% for Exchange, a narrowing gap."
Austin, a Gartner group vice president and research fellow who conducted that research, said the statistic was for 2007 shipments of Notes vs. Exchange only. It is far different than the percentage of people actually using either software today, the installed base.
Based on that measurement, "Microsoft Exchange has at least three times the users of Notes with enterprises with 500 or more users," Austin said. IBM may be adding Notes users, but its share of the installed base "is getting smaller," he said.
Later versions of the IBM press release have that statement and the Gartner statistic deleted.
I really did think this debate was over, not least because the key research organizations show Lotus well behind. eWeek reported on Thursday 15th Jan:
IDC's annual market share analysis of collaborative environments puts Microsoft's market share at 52 percent, with IBM's market share slipping 5 percent to 37.7 percent. A Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide found Exchange in 65 percent of those shops.
I regularly look at UK’s IT Jobs Watch as a decent indicator of technology vitality and share. The story is here in the jobs data for Lotus Notes and Domino and their key competitors: Exchange and Sharepoint. The charts are directly comparable, as they cover the same time periods and are measured against the same pool of job postings.
Lotus Notes (all versions):
Lotus Domino (all versions)
Exchange (version not specified)
Exchange 2007
Sharepoint (version not specified)
Sharepoint 2007
For the past year or so I’ve been working with a team at Microsoft on a project named BizSpark, which we launched worldwide starting on Nov 5th, 2008. BizSpark is the second in a family of programs designed for early-stage developers. The first program, DreamSpark, provides students with professional-level design and development tools. BizSpark takes that idea and expands it for high-tech startups.
There’s plenty of information about BizSpark on the sites I linked to above, and in the press. but as I haven’t posted at all for about nine months, I’ll use this post to get started again with some background and a less formal description of the program. I may add a couple more posts to answer some of the questions I’ve heard.
Why startups? We built a special program for technology-based startups because they foretell the future of technology in business. Thousands of new technology-based companies are started every year. While few achieve long-term success, every one provides us with a view of technology’s role in the context of a novel business opportunity.
What do they get? BizSpark gives startups software, support and visibility. There’s a detailed description here, but in short: software means all the Microsoft products they need to build, test and deploy their product, for three years; support includes 1:1 developer-level assistance with technical problems, as well as the community support provided by the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN); visibility is via the BizSpark DB on Microsoft’s StartupZone site.
The software offer is as comprehensive as we could make it. Startups get a MSDN premium subscription for three years, for each of their developers. Each subscription includes all of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Expressions Studio developer tools, and all the platform software (Windows, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, etc) that they need to build and test the application. The majority of startups are also building web-based applications, which they’ll host themselves or though a hosting service provider like YouSaaS, OpSource or Peer1, so BizSpark also provides free server licenses to put those applications into production. The production license allow unlimited use of Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Server and Systems Center during the three-year membership. We’ll be adding Windows CRM to that list soon.
In addition, startups get access to a number of “cloud services” from Windows Live, and they are guaranteed access to the Windows Azure Community Technology Preview.
What is a startup? Startup businesses must be less than three years old, earning less than $1M/year (the revenue limit is lower in some countries), and not yet publicly held, at the time they enter the program. They must be building a software-based product which directly serves their customers, rather than doing work for hire.
How do I get it? Startups can enroll on http://microsoft.com/BizSpark. There they’ll see a list of organizations (BizSpark Network Partners) any of whom can enroll them in their own country, or they can contact Microsoft directly. Here are some of the Network Partners a UK-based startup would see:
There are well over 900 BizSpark Network Partners worldwide so far. They represent the entrepreneurial ecosystem: organizations or individuals who help startups and have offered to make BizSpark available to the startups they work with.
If a startup would like help selecting a Network Partner, or does not wish to work with one, the site will connect them directly with a local Microsoft employee (a BizSpark Champ) who can recommend a Network Partner or can enroll the startup directly.
BizSpark Champs are Microsoft employees who are passionate about startups and so can enroll both Network Partners and startups. There are over 200 Champs worldwide. BizSpark is part of the job for some.
 Julien Codorniou, for example, runs the BizSpark program worldwide.
 Anand Iyer is a Champ in the Silicon Valley) and a wholly voluntary activity for others
 Bill Staples, a GM in the Server and Tools Business, is an avid blogger and volunteer Champ
How much does it cost? $100 payable at the end of three years membership.
More to follow in BizSpark 201 There was a thought-provoking and balanced post on this subject on ChannelWeb Tuesday. It makes the point that Sharepoint's growth and adoption mirrors that of Lotus Notes in the nineties. Like Notes, Sharepoint provides an easily-accessible application platform, and that accessibility can lead to problems of scaling, maintenance and management. They quote a CMSWatch Report on Sharepoint, that says: We have a lot of things to say about SharePoint, but for starters, we observe that it has become "the new Lotus Notes," repeating history as it mimics Notes' allure and pitfalls The ChannelWeb article goes on to say: CMS Watch's view is that with both Lotus Notes and SharePoint, flexibility is a double edged sword, and the ease with which custom applications can be built on the platform poses challenges for IT staff. SharePoint also suffers from shortcomings with regard to its collaboration capabilities and lacks the scalability and administrative controls necessary to make it viable for enterprise deployments, according to CMS Watch. The article quotes a couple of Sharepoint-savvy partners who agree that uncontrolled development can lead companies into trouble. I think the article makes reasonable observations, but the most insightful point is made (or hinted at) towards the end: But Ric Opal, vice president of Peters & Associates, an Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based solution provider, discounts comparisons between SharePoint and Lotus Notes. "We're in a different era, and the entire industry is different now than it was then," he said. "With the applications being deployed on Sharepoint, the back end is SQL Server, which is robust and used by tons of applications. It's an industry standard database that just about anyone can write to," said Opal. As for SharePoint's scalability limitations, Opal said "that's going to hold true with any technology if you don't properly architect a solution sitting on top of a database." The real difference between Lotus Notes and Sharepoint is the underlying platform each was built on. Sharepoint is built on .NET and SQL and it's a first class element of the Microsoft application platform. That was never the case for Lotus Notes. Notes was built on a set of unique technologies, none of which ever made it into the mainstream of IBM's application platform: - The Notes database
- The Notes Directory and certificate structure
- The Notes application platform: programming model, document model, and language
IBM is clearly committed to DB2 as it's database, Tivoli for security and Websphere as its application platform. The fact that Lotus supported none of these drove IBM's disastrous migration of Notes to a new "Workplace" platform, which they announced at Lotusphere in 2002. That approach, recently and quietly abandoned, demonstrated clear IBM's ambivalence toward the product and created a five-year period of unrest for customers and partners. As the Channelweb article concludes: Recent indications that Microsoft is working to add new functionality to SharePoint suggest that the vendor isn't planning to rest on its laurels with SharePoint, says Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at twentysix New York, a New York-based IT consultancy. Correct. The biggest differences between Notes and Sharepoint are in their underlying technology bases and the confidence and investment that their respective builders place in them. CNet reported just a few hours ago (09:30 PDT Sunday) on the International Standards Organization vote on approving the Office Open XML specification as ISO standard DIS 29500: Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday. The article quotes the OpenMalaysia blog: "... group of individual bloggers working to build openness in Malaysia's ICT culture. Most of us have day jobs and a couple of us are students. Those with a job work for companies ranging from large international enterprises to self-run Malaysian start-ups." The voting ended at midnight Saturday, CET. The OpenMalaysia post, two and a half hours later, predicts that OO XML will pass the ballot. There are two criteria for approval, and OpenMalayis summarised the criteria and predicted the result as follows: Voting Criteria (JTC1 Directives, page 49): - At least two-thirds of the P-members voting shall have approved;
- Not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative.
Prediction: - Criteria 1: 22/32 = 68.75% (PASS)
- Criteria 2: 14/69 = 20.29% (PASS)
- Overall Result: PASS
The ISO vote on OOXML closes at midnight CET tonight. It's been a divisive topic, and while browsing for the last-minute volleys on the subject, I happened on this debate. It is mostly a one-sided set of rants about how much IBM will or won't support OOXML and what"support" really means. But, buried down towards the end is a long-ish and mostly well-written comment from Doug Heintzman, "Director of Strategy for IBM Collaboration Technologies," which includes this paragraph: Let's be clear. IBM believes that the monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation. We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration. We believe that a modern XML based file format will allow customers to perform business analytics, generate automated semantic information, improved searchability, and make the information contained in documents much more socially and process aware and increase its overall value to the customer. We think that documents will become much more seamlessly integrated into business applications and processes. I was struck by how little the topic sentence: "IBM believes that monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation" had to do with what followed: "We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration ...." From his job title, I suspect Doug knows something about collaboration, and is credible in the main part of the paragraph. I believe he is right in that part and I think most people in the industry (including those at Microsoft) would agree. See this from http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/choice.mspx Microsoft has long believed in the power of XML-based file formats to unlock data in documents and to help integrate front and back office processes – while providing significant opportunities for independent software vendors to create high-value applications But why the disconnected opening sentence about monopolistic domination? Well, IBM cast the only "no" vote for ECMA approval of OOXML, and has done the same in the ISO Technical group. From ZDNet yesterday A technical group formed to make a recommendation to the BSI's policy panel has voted five-to-one in favour of OOXML being accepted as an international standard, a source close to the process has told ZDNet.co.uk. There was intense lobbying by interested parties before a meeting on Tuesday, in which IBM was apparently the one remaining dissident. IBM uses the competing OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is already an international standard. Given the trend in IBM's share of the collaboration market, I can understand a certain peevishness in Doug's opinion. But, for the same reason, he might do better to focus less on the economics of business, and a whole lot more on IBM's strategy for Collaboration Technologies. Interesting article on the OOXML saga on Internet.com yesterday, but the piece that caught my eye was this one from Patrick Durusau, who is chairperson of the technical committee advising the U.S. governing board. Interestingly, Durusau may be an ODF backer, but he's pragmatic too, and had some direct words for opponents of OOXML on his blog: "What is puzzling in this day and age of quarterly reports and returns that any corporate governance structure would long tolerate spite as a business strategy. Or that investors would stay with companies that follow such strategies. "OpenDocument supporters should be wishing that [OOXML] will be approved along with a new work item to amend it to fix the problems found at the BRM ... Any other wish is a walk in a cold rain with a Russian peasant wishing his neighbor's cow would die," IBM Announced 10% revenue growth in the 4th quarter of 20007. 6% of the growth came from currency fluctuations (as the value of overseas income rose in dollar terms due to the dollar's decline). In other words, 4% is a better measure of business growth. Software revenues grew 12% in dollar terms in the 4th quarter; 6% in constant currency terms. The interesting news is in the software segments: - Websphere (application platform and portal) grew 23% in dollar terms - Information Management (Database, the biggest segment by far) -- 11% - Tivoli (Systems Management) -- 19% - Lotus (Collaboration) -- 7% 
Lotus significantly lagged the other IBM software businesses, and after accounting for currency fluctuations, showed no growth in the fourth quarter of 2007. 
It's only one quarter. It's possible these results reflect customers postponing purchases until the new Eclipse-based Notes/Domino 8 (which launched in August last year) is proven out. <updated with supplemental segment information from IBM> An update on earlier posts comparing jobs for the two leading enterprise collaboration platforms: IBM's Notes, Domino and Workplace products vs Microsoft's Sharepoint and Exchange. Comments and caveats: - It's only one country, so doesn't necessarily reflect the situation outside the UK.
- Here's an alternative view of the job market
- The ITJobsWatch site appears to provide high quality, normalised and de-duped data, so it shouldn't be compared with keyword job search sites in which:
- a query for, Notes, may return jobs ".. taking notes ..." or Exchange may return jobs in a " ... stock exchange ..."
- a single position will appear many times from different sources.
Application Platforms: UK Permanent and Contract IT Positions for 3 months ended Jan 16th 2008 Source ITJobsWatch 16th January, 2008 
Note: this site breaks out the MSFT products by release (Exchange2003, Exchange 2007, etc), so I added together the individual results. The Lotus releases are combined (i.e. one entry for Notes, one for Domino). 12-month Trend: Lotus Notes Permanent positions trend is shown in the chart below 
Additional 12-month trend lines for each company's leading entries are below: Domino Permanent Positions Notes Contract Positions Domino Contract Positions MS Exchange Permanent Positions MS Exchange Contract Positions Sharepoint Permanent Positions Sharepoint Contract Positions | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /Blogs/cliff_reeves/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /Blogs/cliff_reeves/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /Blogs/cliff_reeves/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /Blogs/cliff_reeves/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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Cliff Reeves
Collaboration
I was born in Sri Lanka (then it was called Ceylon) of British parents. I lived in Sri Lanka, England, and Malta before moving to the US in 1973. In the US I have lived in NC (Raleigh), TX (Dallas and Austin), MA (Boston), and WA (Kirkland). At present I roam between my family home in NC and my work home in WA I am marri...
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Recent Posts
BizSpark 201 – how it’s implemented
January 21, 2009
Just a flesh wound …
January 20, 2009
BizSpark 101
January 20, 2009
Will Sharepoint Suffer the Same Fate as Lotus Notes?
Monday, April 14, 2008
Early Prediction on Office Open XML Vote
Monday, April 14, 2008
A good post spoiled ...
March 29, 2008
”Spite as a Business Strategy"
March 12, 2008
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Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is Frotcom International, based in Portugal. You will find below an interview with Valério Manuel Machado Marques, Co-founder and CEO of Frotcom International. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
Read more...
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