Microsoft's decision to axe Essential Business Server program surprises few

3/19/2010 1:00 PM

Computing giant Microsoft earlier this month announced that it would discontinue development and support for its Essential Business Server line of products, a move that many IT professionals had been expecting for some time.

The company said in a blog post that "since the launch of EBS, several changes have occurred that drove our decision to streamline our server product portfolio. First, midsize businesses are rapidly turning to technologies such as management, virtualization and cloud computing as a means to cut costs, improve efficiency, and increase competitiveness."

Tech experts noted that redundancy seems to have been a primary motivator in the decision. The IT director of a New York architecture firm told Tech Target that, although the EBS system could have made an interesting choice for a company just starting a new network, existing products provided much of the functionality that EBS offered and that migration was a risky choice.

While the move toward simplification that EBS represented was in line with the general trend of Microsoft's more recent releases, EBS' lack of cloud computing capacity may ultimately have proven its undoing.

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