Form left: Kevin Turner, COO Microsoft Corporation; Tan Tong Hai, COO StarHub; Jessica Tan, MD Microsoft Singapore
Microsoft is making a substantial move to the cloud with Office365 — think Exchange and Word, but only existing in the cloud — whose open beta was just launched worldwide earlier this week.
In a press conference in Singapore yesterday, Microsoft announced that they would be launching Office365 beta for business customers in Singapore through telco StarHub.
As a syndication partner, StarHub is responsible for guaranteeing service quality to business customers locally through SLAs, for example, up to 99.99 percent network uptime.
Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner said that details are still being worked out with StarHub, but a “financially backed SLA is definitely part of the offering.”
Thus far, Microsoft has already signed up 230 local SMB and enterprise customers, said Jessica Tan, managing director for Microsoft Singapore. Notable names include Singapore Airport Terminal Services, who is currently trying out the Office 365 beta.
The final costing details are still being worked out with StarHub, but could go down to as low as S$8 per user per month, depending on application, said Jessica.
Microsoft’s COO Kevin believes that the cloud market is here to stay: “The cloud market is huge. Clearly, a technology inflection point has been reached and it will last a while.”
He also believes that the Office365 offering puts them in a more competitive position vs. competitors and made a barb at IBM: “This year, we will displace 5 million seats from IBM Lotus Notes worldwide.”
Microsoft vs. Google
But of course, the elephant in the room that was not mentioned is the one company that forced Microsoft and others like IBM to move to a cloud-based model for productivity tools: Google.
Google launched a partnership with SingTel (ONEOffice) to sell their Google Apps last year in April 2010 here in Singapore.
Thus it’s not surprising that Microsoft is working with StarHub, the other big telco here, on its Office365 offering.
From a technical perspective, Microsoft is running their own datacenter here that hosts Office365, and StarHub guarantees the last mile connectivity, be it wired or wireless.
According to Microsoft, Office 365 will work on all mobile platforms and tablets. Of course, it will work best on Windows Phone 7 (WP7) and Nokia Symbian devices (whom Microsoft has a partnership with), but they will ensure that it will work on any device that can browse HTML, said Microsoft.
This partnership with StarHub is not an exclusive one, conceded Microsoft when queried. However StarHub’s COO Tan Tong Hai said that as a “preferred partner”, their network capabilities and SMB channels made them a “good fit” for Microsoft.
In my opinion, more choice in the market can only mean good things for businesses here. For local businesses who want to trial the Office365 beta, you can contact StarHub directly or email them at biz@starhub.com.
