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Tuesday, 18 November 2014 00:06 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The forum, which was conducted exclusively for CEOs, addressed the dramatic change that has occurred in the commercial world, with the advent of an entire spectrum of devices and on cloud services. During a phase of such tremendous advancement in the industry Microsoft who holds 90% share of the PC market in the South Asian region has also changed as a company, making ‘Mobile First – Cloud First’ a priority.
Imran Vilcassim, Country Manager for Microsoft, Sri Lanka & Maldives speaking at the forum said that the company’s new mission is to compete in the mobile first cloud first platform, where they are well placed to offer total solutions that are tailor made for their customers. “We will create true digital work life experiences delivered across a multiple variety of devices through cloud based services in the future. Our’s is a highly productivityoriented platform and we are in a position to enable some of our world class productivity tools such as office excel, one drive for online storage and Skype etc., all of which support the digital work life experience.”
The Country Manager said that Microsoft can make all of this available for multiple eco systems, so thatusers can move from one device to another with ease, ensuring that the services and content as well as the rest, follow without any difficulty. Speaking about this new direction, he said, “This is our way of ensuring that we follow you and not the device. Our objective is to reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organisation to do more and achieve more. So in order to offer our valued customers, 21st century solutions that would make all these changespossible, we too as an organisation had to undergo change. We could not operate in the mind-set of a monopoly and had to change from within, in order to embrace this new journey of transformation across all our 125 000 plus employees across 190 plus countries.”
Microsoft has realigned their engineering sector to become more innovative and agile, whilst making it possible for related product roles to synergise better. With these significant changes the Company has been able to reduce the number of silos, creating deeper integration of their products and services across the organisation, resulting in far superior customer relations.
Imran said that Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella being of Asian origin is another plus factor in terms of the Company understanding this region and its needs better. “In my 11 year career with Microsoft, I never expected to see the day we would give the windows OS free of charge; but we are doing it today. We provide windows free for devices, which are less than 9 inches in screen size. Office was our biggest competitive advantage over iPhone, ipad and android devices which hold a larger market share compared to us at the moment and our free offer encompasses these devices.”
With the acquisition of Nokia Microsoft now has a range of first party devices including windows phones and phablets. Microsoft Surface is another device the company has successfully launched andthey have established partnerships with a number of third party companies who they would not have thought to engage with previously; creating real change that has made a significant impact within Microsoft. In the last 60 to 90 days alone, the company has establishedaround 10 to 12 partnerships, some of them with Chinese companies. They expect some unique products and devices to come out of these partnerships that will give Microsoft a strong positioning in the mobile market space.
As for enterprise, the company intends to continue the licensing model for some time as that is the requirement for now but has plans to gradually evolve it into a subscription based model which would be more in keeping with future trends.
He also added that Microsoft’s current affiliation with Toyota to synchronise all their divisions has brought in the RND andsales sections together to create one. Microsoft is also involved in doing some groundbreaking work with the Lotus F1 team. “Thisis a car which has 200 sensors around it and all these sensors feed live data to our cloud platform, which was used to analyse its performance.”
Microsoft says that work becoming mobile, increases an employee’s productivity and ability to respond faster, in turn helping the organisation to engage with stakeholders in a more responsive manner. Technological advancements in software would provide a greater benefit to enterprise CEO’s where they would have the ability to connect and monitor processes and manage activities from anywhere in the world, with whatever device.The Microsoft package whichincludes MS office, cloud, onedrive, Skype, Lync and social networking tools such as yammer,for both PCs and mobile;helps the corporate CEOs to work smarter and toget maximum productivity from employees. It also creates a more interactive environment where employees and management would engage in a more social manner of communication, taking the enterprise business platform to a new and different level.
