CT: How do you see the demand of Microsoft Office 365 growing in India and what kind of traction do you see in SMBs and enterprise customers?
Sharma: Microsoft Office 365 as it stands today has all the ingredients to be the most successful product not only in India, but globally. We fully believe and endorse the vision that O365 carries to enable SMBs and Enterprises on a robust growth path and let them focus on their core business. We also believe that Microsoft Office 365’s approach to become a platform for employee productivity for companies will ensure that more and more products are added to the suite. As a partner, our focus in on SMBs we are confident that Indian SMBs will take India global and we will partner with them in the journey with scalable and robust technology solutions.
Fast growing SMBs will drive the demand of Office 365 is India. We foresee Office 365 as a platform to build value added services on top of it by partner to cater to SMBs and Enterprises alike. Moreover, I believe that pitching O365 needs a proactive approach instead of reactive. One or the other component of O365 will find space in all the companies in India. If we go by the full suite adoption then new companies, fast moving SMBs or enterprises looking to control or optimize their IT budgets seems to be the early adopters. Currently, we are managing 50+ customers on O365 and related MS Cloud services.
CT: Can you elaborate on your partnership with Microsoft?
Sharma: We firmly believe that mobile is the inflection point to drive the consumption of technology and a robust and scalable cloud service will drive this change. We are entirely focused on selling cloud services, with having capabilities like partner cloud advisory board member, cloud deployment partner, cloud accelerate partner, small business competency and messaging competency. We are doing some path breaking work on mobile. We have recently powered the CREDAI National Conclave on mobile.
CT: Tell us about Cloud journey so far and what are the opportunities cloud computing offers to solution providers?
Sharma: We believe that Cloud is a logical evolution of technology and is not an option for companies. We envisioned Cloud and Mobile would play a major role in technology evolution and started with a born in Cloud team in Oct 2011. All are team members whether its deployment, migration, sales or marketing are engineers are having strong technology background. We have observed that Cloud can only be sold by technical folks and that’s the key. In my view, there are several opportunities and benefits for Solution Providers while selling Cloud solutions including:
Option of Customer POC: Our approach is to offer POCs to customers to solve their technology problems. This has brought confidence in customers and faster sales completion cycle. Hence, with Cloud you can afford to fail faster and deliver better solutions.
Mobility: Mobile is the closest computing device a user would carry and with Cloud a lot of path breaking mobile solutions can be delivered.
Managed Service: Cloud has also opened avenues to deliver managed services to the customers.
Consulting: As we know, Indian companies lag behind their peers in Technology. Hence, it brings forth an opportunity for technology consulting to build technology roadmap and transition strategy.
CT: Tell us about your overall experience and challenges in selling MS office 365
Sharma: We are having a great experience with Microsoft. It offers wider platform of interconnected application or platform as ecosystem. The main challenges for O365 lies in education, most of the SMBs are not tech savvy in India. However, the scenario is changing rapidly but we need to impart more education on the product and possibilities and second is skilled workforce, we can’t find experts but have to build and groom. This process takes time.
CT: Within SaaS what are your offerings. Do you want to expand your capabilities into Iaas and PaaS?
Our vision is to be the Cloud and Mobile Centre for Excellence for SMBs. In SaaS, we are focussed on Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint, Office Suite and CRM. We also have our own Mobile Web Solutions offering as SaaS. We realise that SaaS will be the starting point for SMBs and then they will move on to IaaS and PaaS. We are already delivering a few IaaS based solutions and are aggressively working on the next pivotal model of PaaS.