Channel Chief
“Office 2010 is a $5.6 billion opportunity”
 Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Microsoft Business Division, says that Office 2010 is a huge opportunity for partners and developers. Varun Aggarwal spoke to him and got some more details
What are the new features in Office 2010?
Office 2010 comes with seamless collaboration with anywhere, anytime access to documents.
Office Web Applications, the browser or cloud version of Office 2010, preserves the look and feel of a document regardless of the device, hence the content and format stay exactly the same while moving between PC, phone and browser. The cloud platform offers additional choice and flexibility.
Office 2010, along with SharePoint 2010, delivers a business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the Internet, and enables developers to respond to business needs with custom applications and solutions. Customers can reduce development costs and deliver solutions which are more adaptable to business changes with the full power of .Net and Visual Studio 2010 tools.
For mobile phones, we’ve launched Office Mobile 2010. It will be available on not just the Windows Mobile but also the Symbian platform starting with the Nokia E series phones.
How can a partner leverage the BI and other SharePoint capabilities of Office 2010?
SharePoint 2010 helps in building dashboards using Excel as the front end; this helps in making quick dashboards. Excel now has a tighter integration with SharePoint, making this integration much easier. Also included is a large number of templates that can be easily customized for faster deployments. These capabilities will help the partners to use the SharePoint platform to build a large number of applications, including workflow automation and BI, for the customer.
We are working with partners to train them in such features. With more features coming in with Office 2010—like BI—it’ll be easier for partners to quickly meet changing customer requirements.
How are you enabling partners for Office 2010?
We are currently running a 10-city enablement program for our channel partners. We’ve already trained about 230 partner organizations, along with their sales and technical staff, to ensure they are ready to sell and deploy the product. Our target is to reach out to all our 750 managed partners within the next one to one and half month.
Because the Office 2010 suite also comprises SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010, we’re running training and enablement programs for systems integrators and ISVs. We’ve already trained about 9,000 IT professionals in Office 2010.
The beta program has been extremely successful with 1.3 million downloads in India itself. We estimate that globally the overall partner-plus-developer opportunity from the new release stands at about $5.6 billion; we expect that to grow to $6.7 billion by 2011. We already have more than 2,000 organizations deploying Office 2010 in India.
How many SKUs will you have?
Office 2010 volume licensing is already available for customers, while the retail availability will be from June 15. There’ll be overall five SKUs of Office 2010 targeting different segments. For volume licensing, we’ll have two SKUs: Office 2010 Standard, which is targeted at SMBs; and Office 2010 Professional Plus, targeted at enterprise customers. Office 2010 Professional and Office 2010 Home and Business address the needs of small businesses. The Office Home and Student edition is meant for home users.
Office 2010 comes with a common disk for all editions and separate product key cards for different SKUs, so partners are concerned that they won’t be able to get any additional revenue for upgrades.
With Office 2010, we’ve simplified the deployment process for consumers. There won’t be separate disks for separate SKUs. The consumer will buy a standard disk and use a product key card to unlock the version of Office 2010 that he’s paid for. The product key card will also help a user to upgrade to a different SKU without having to re-install Office, thus making the upgrade much easier than before.
As far as partners are concerned, they will make money from the deployment of Office 2010 even if it is an upgrade from a lower version. However, if the customer buys the upgrade product key card from a different source, the partner will not benefit from the upgrade. That said, this will not be a concern for most of our partners because businesses will always turn to channel partners for any upgrade, in which case the partner does get paid for the deployment of the upgrade. |