Bhatia unveils MS Office-like suite

Bangalore-based InstaColl, co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia, Sumanth Raghavendra and Kaushal Cavale, today launched an application called Live Documents, which is a hybrid online-offline office suite of applications with features similar to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

In development for the last two years, the product is truly a 'Made in India' product, according to Sabeer Bhatia, chairman, Instacoll.

"I believe Live Documents does what Hotmail (which Bhatia sold to Microsoft for a little over $400 million) did for e-mail," he said.

Sumanth Raghavendra, CEO, Instacoll, said, "The launch of Live Documents will fill all the gaps that Microsoft has not been able to fill, especially in the online category. With its software and services approach, users can access this via a hosted model, on premises servers or use a plug and play appliance."

Instacoll is doing a controlled release, but within the next 2 to 3 weeks will make it available to everyone across the globe. Individual users can access this for free, till the company decides on the pricing. However, the enterprise version will be charged.

The company already has Aricent (earlier known an Flextronics) as its first enterprise client. Almost 7,000 employees of Aricent will be using this application.

"The pricing will be minimal even for the enterprises. As low as $50 for the full year or $10 per month. Volumes can always bring down the price further," said Bhatia. He pointed out that Live Documents will allow companies to cut costs.

Using Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allows a user to view and edit documents with any common browser, on any operating system, from anywhere.

The application also allows collaboration on real-time basis. The company claims that almost 3,000 people can collaborate together on a single document on real-time basis.