Sun shines on small business

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Plans are afoot to start promoting Sun’s rival to Microsoft Office, StarOffice 8, to small businesses this year in a bid to boost adoption levels in companies with 20 to 100 employees.

Supporters of the office productivity package, based on OpenOffice, claim to have seen adoption of the product at the enterprise level and also among very small businesses – typically with one to ten users – and individuals.

“Companies with ten or less employees have been adopting StarOffice quite a lot,” said Stephen Ennis, technical director at Sun partner Horizon Open Systems. He claimed enterprise customers were making a decision to adopt StarOffice based on cost and its availability on multiple platforms – StarOffice can run on Windows, Linux and Sun’s Solaris operating system.

But he admitted there was “a job to be done” in promoting StarOffice to companies in the middle.

“It’s something we’re actively working on,” he revealed. “StarOffice is not just for the enterprise or for the guy at home, it’s a real and viable solution for smaller companies.”

Horizon was working on an awareness exercise to get the message out to small businesses. Until now, the strategy has been to win over a portion of enterprise customers to use as evidence or proof of StarOffice’s viability and convince the mid-market.

He conceded it could be difficult trying to persuade small businesses to change suites if they were comfortable with the system they already had. “It’s not just about the product and pricing, it’s also about the comfort level,” he said. It was much easier to have a conversation with startup businesses.

Sun claims StarOffice already includes a number of features which Microsoft Office 2007 is expected to deliver – for example, it is XML-based and users can export files as PDF documents.

Ennis was quick to dismiss any talk of exploiting the delay to Office 2007 to try and sway potential small business customers. “The main reasons for choosing StarOffice would not be the reasons why you would wait for Office 2007. I don’t think people waiting for Office 2007 will say ‘we’ll go for StarOffice because it’s been delayed’. They should be making the decision for different reasons.”

Horizon claims StarOffice is about one-fifth the cost of Microsoft Office, depending on whether you download it or buy the packaged product. The licence also entitles users to install the product on up to five machines.

www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice

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