Although this is not new news it’s still something to keep on our minds. The beta version o fMS Office that’s hosted in the cloud has seen over 1.3 mn downloads; over 2,000 firms in India are moving to the latest version. Last September, research firm IDC had cautioned that while Microsoft Office still held the lion’s share of the market for office productivity suites, Google was rapidly gaining ground. The survey indicated that 19.5 per cent of the respondents were in organisations that used Google Docs in some form, up from 5.8 per cent a year earlier.

“The response to Office 2010 suite (which includes Web Apps) in India has been excellent,” said Rajan Anandan, managing director, Microsoft India. He adds that Web Apps can easily match the online offerings of competing players, primarily online search giant Google.

“Over the last 12 months, our strategy has been to sharpen focus on cloud services. Office 2010 was a logical conclusion,” said Anandan. Microsoft, he added, offers cloud services across three layers in India. The first is “Software as a service”, or SaaS, which includes Microsoft Online Services with over 600 commercial customers in India and over 10,000 seats. Its partners include HCL Technologies, Infosys Technologies and Wipro Infotech. They provide the value-added services. Microsoft’s hosted ERP partners include RoboSoft and Net4India.

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