Telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel will offer Microsoft Office 365 to small and medium-sized businesses in India, according to several reports on Tuesday.
This partnership comes a week after US telecommunications provider Sprint launched hosted Microsoft Office 365, enabled by Parallels Automation.
According to MediaNama, Airtel plans to bundle its Microsoft 365 suite with its DSL and Internet Leased Lines for business. The price of the packages is not disclosed on its website, but it appears that there are specific plans targeted at freelancers as well as small business owners.
The small business sector in India is a target for many web hosts and cloud providers. Most of Go Daddy’s 120,000 customers based in India are entrepreneurs and small business owners. In November 2011, HostGator partnered with Google to offer websites to SMB owners through the Google “Get Your Business Online” program.
Recently, Airtel partnered with HP to offer cloud services for SMBs. Last year, Airtel partnered with Savvis to offer managed hosting and cloud hosting.
“We are delighted to partner with Microsoft to address the growing ICT needs of the SMB segment. The partnership will allow us to become a virtual CIO for our SMB customers,” Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel said in a statement. “According to industry estimates there is a growing affinity towards technology adoption in this segment and their IT spending is surging at a rate of 15 percent per year. SMB segment has shown a high adoption of Cloud computing especially SaaS – which contributes more than 50 percent to the overall cloud market. With our superior network experience and Microsoft’s dependable technology suite we will be able to offer cost effective and secure cloud services in a high growth SaaS market.”
Under this agreement, customers will be able to create a public facing website with a domain name, access the latest releases from Office 365, anti-virus solutions and access to documents and emails anywhere.
“We are pleased that Bharti Airtel will offer our world-class cloud productivity solution to SMBs in India,” Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India said in a statement. “Agility, focus and cost are the key reasons why businesses are moving to a cloud and hence Microsoft’s partnership will allow Bharti Airtel’s customers to continue to stay ahead of the curve through solutions that truly fit their needs. The agreement will enable SMBs to take advantage of a secure cloud computing environment at an opex model based pricing.”
In May, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure startup incubator program in India. In addition to mentorship and resources, startups will be able to work in the Microsoft Bangladore office to develop their business.
Talk back: Do you have many customers in India? What kinds of services do you offer these customers? Let us know in a comment.
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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/telecom-bharti-airtel-offers-indian-smbs-microsoft-office-365
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