Microsoft to expand SME partnerships in India

In a bid to reach out to a greater number of Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) in India, Microsoft Corporation is expanding its distribution partnership from 16 to 40 cities in the country. SMB is the fastest growing segment for the company and contributes around 40 per cent of its global revenues.

“Each office requires around three people initially and then the headcount eventually increases. India is a market with a double-digit growth rate and is doing well among the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries. We are not at all hasty about this market,” said Mark Wolfram, General Manager, Worldwide SMS&P, Midmarket Business, Microsoft Corp.

Last year the company added offices in three new cities of Jaipur, Jamshedpur and Lucknow, taking its direct presence in India to 16 cities. These centres work like the hubs through which the company reaches out to over 100 cities in the country.

Wolfram explained that SMBs have the ability and flexibility to find opportunities in a slowdown, but they are also faced with the challenges of cutting costs, and increasing productivity and revenues. Entrepreneurs, he said, are more flexible and cited a survey done by the company which revealed that 86 per cent of small business owners indicated that despite the economic downturn, they still prefer owning their own businesses to working for someone else.

Microsoft spends around $6.5 billion on research and development (R&D) of technologies for the SMB segment and maintains that the next round of products will be aimed for this segment. One of the products to reduce costs is Unified Communication, which saves the SMBs’ travel costs and reduces overall costs by 20 per cent. The company has a SMB Portal, which is an online support for SMBs with details of the relevant products for them along with advice on how to acquire original software.

On the Office front, Microsoft is offering Office Live Workspaces (OLW) to SMBs. OLW can save more than 1,000 Microsoft Office documents to one place online and access them via the Web.

The company is seeing more growth in non-metros compared to the metros and wants to increase its share in total personal computer (PC) shipments from 90 per cent to 95 per cent.

Sharing the company’s plans going ahead, Wolfram said,” We want to be present in all the small towns but not by setting up production and development entities but through a channel ecosystem.”