Special Focus
Productivity on Cloud
 Office suites are now taking the cloud route and offering advanced services, luring partners with smart gain
By Varun Aggarwal
While all applications are moving to the cloud, there is no reason why the ubiquitous office productivity suites like MS Office or OpenOffice should stick to the desktop. Providing customers with a key set of capabilities, and a browser to aid easy access makes complete sense. Take for instance a student working on a class paper. Writing in a Web browser might aid in sharing and incorporating constructive changes, but it is a cumbersome experience as compared to using Office on his PC. But by using productivity suite online, he gets best of both worlds.
Players in the field
Recently, Microsoft launched the technical preview version of Office Web Apps. It extends Office experience to the browser, enabling access to files from anywhere. The apps offer customers format fidelity (ability to open, create, make lightweight edits and save documents without losing any formatting), high fidelity viewing and a consistent UI across the desktop and browser.
After an extended beta testing phase, Google is offering Google Apps, which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation along with e-mail. Mumbai-based Kushal Shah, Co-founder, Resorcetek Systems, who uses Google Apps, says, “We actively promote Google Apps for small companies because of its ease of use and collaborative benefits. Online suites are helpful for a start-up to grow in an organized, yet inexpensive manner. The remote access of documents also reduces duplication of efforts.”
“The suite helps create new docs, spreadsheets etc that can be easily share with a group. In a small company, when sales executives need to access a common database and do not want to spam customers by making repeat calls, the spreadsheet is quite useful. Marketing executives can share presentation for a more collaborative approach as well. A company could even share status documents with clients,” Shah elaborates.
Offering tough competition to the two is another popular online office suite Zoho. Sudhakar S Marthi, Director, Sales and Marketing, Asia-Pacific, Zoho Corp offers, “Compared to our online competitors like Google Apps, we take pride in offering depth in each of our offerings. For example, Zoho Sheet supports VB Macros and pivoting, Zoho Writer offers a page-wise view and Zoho Show has master layout.”
Adobe also plans to launch its online office suite, currently in beta phase, by early next year. The online suite will have a word processor called Adobe Buzzword, a spreadsheet tool called Adobe Tables and a presentation tool called Adobe Presentations. PN Anantharaman, Director Engineering, Adobe Systems India says, “We will offer a full-feature online office suite enabled by our Flex and RIA technologies. We will also offer conversion to pdf files absolutely free of charge in the online suite.”
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Online suites: Pros and cons analyzed
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Benefits
- Pay as you go offering. No capital investment
- Work from anywhere, be it office, home or mobile
- Partners can add new features to these suites working with vendors
- Online storage (mostly free) helps in reducing storage costs for a small company
- New training opportunities for partners, especially in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities
Drawbacks
- Some advanced features of office suites are still amiss in most of the online suites
- Lack of bandwidth may spoil the experience. Offline capabilities can help improve this
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Benefits for businesses
An online suite does not incur capital cost, unlike a desktop suite. Its pay per use model is a boon for SMBs that employ only the basic features of a productivity suite on a day-to-day basis. Paying for a comprehensive and hence more expensive version, only to use the advanced features couple of times in a year doesn’t make sense. Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner offers, “A customer might want to use a feature once in six months, but he’ll still have to buy an annual license for it. With online suites, he can activate additional features when required and pay only for the duration used. Later, he can deactivate them as well.”
Other important benefit of online suites is storage. “In a content management company, a lot of data is generated in the form of word and excel documents, straining the storage requirements of the company. By working on an online suite, the company gets a lot of free storage. In addition, with a user name and password, the documents are as secure as on desktops. The storage can be further increased by paying a nominal amount,” says Chakraborti.
Online suites liberate employees from the shackles of office desktops. Most online suites offer mobile connectivity as well, enabling access to documents through smartphones. For light documents, the user experience is no different from that on a desktop office. Though as file sizes go up, the user experience would be affected owing to bandwidth bottlenecks.
Online free-dom
One major plus of online suites is their price point. Many of the online office suites offer either free versions or limited free seats to the existing customers.
Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft India says, “Office Web Apps will be available to existing consumers at no extra charge through Windows Live. Our volume licensing customers will have access to the Office Web Apps. Businesses, who want more security and control, can subscribe to our Microsoft Online Services.”
Dismissing the idea that online suites could be a threat to Office, Manchanda says, “Services are an opportunity to grow our business. We’re bringing new customers on board like Coca-Cola Enterprises, Energizer and Ingersoll Rand. We have 5.1 million seats of Notes exchanged for Microsoft last year. With Windows Live, there is an interesting opportunity to extend the Office brand to new customers.”
What’s in it for partners?
In the online suites arena, partners will be engaged in more than just box selling. Just like any other SaaS model, online suites open up a huge opportunity for services. “As part of services, we charge a minimal fee for the configuration and set up. We also provide training to the end users. Clients who were earlier using Gmail are very happy to use a similar layout that requires minimal change,” adds Shah. “When we provide such applications as part of our software services, we are adding value to our customer offering—without any additional cost.”
If medium-size clients are looking for extended Google services, they can even opt for paid version that comes with full service and support at $25 per user, per year.
Another big opportunity for the partners lies in building their own public clouds using such services. Marthi offers, “We work with our partners to enable them to build their own public clouds wherein they can host our services in their data centers and charge the customers for services. For customers who are concerned about security, we enable them to setup a private cloud with the help of our partners.”
Zoho has more than 100 reseller partners and many ISVs using its APIs. “ISVs are key partners to work with. It is mutually beneficial. Our partners' customers benefit from having Zoho's functionality integrated in their products, and we benefit by reaching out to a larger audience,” Marthi adds.
Adobe is also working with partners to offer both Adobe cloud offerings and at the same time allow partners to build their own clouds using Adobe suite. Anantharaman said, “We’re working with our ISV partners to develop APIs that can be used within our office suite to enhance the rich feature set of our offering. We haven’t yet finalized a go to market strategy. But by early 2010, we’ll have everything ready to market. We’re also working on an offline capability to ensure the user doesn’t lose access to his documents if there’s a drop in connectivity.”
Another important business opportunity lies in training. Chakraborti opined, “There’s a huge market for training in office suites in the country, especially in smaller cities. Online suites require less time to train and hence more SMBs would be willing to allow their employees to take these training.”
While online office suites are growing rapidly both in terms of advanced features and adoption, enterprise adoption may still take time. According to Chakraborti, “Any enterprise with over 500 employees won’t shift to online suites within, at least, the next five years.”
That said, for partners that are ahead of the curve, online suites can help boost their business and open up new opportunities like hosting, services and training. |