The Great Eastern Center, 70 Nehru Place, New Delhi 110019
Tel
26294600
Fax
26292650
Website
www.microsoft.com/india
Rajiv Kaul Managing director
Ranjiv Singh
Business & marketing officer
Sudeb Muthieya
Director (enterprise
and partner group)
Dilip Mistry
Net evangelist
Sameer Kashyap
Financial controller
Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 enjoys number one market position in India, according to IDC
Heavy investments in the India development center
Agreements in academic space and e-governance —in Karnataka, Chandigarh & Uttaranchal
Project Shiksha kicked off in schools
Strong marketing muscle and brand equity
Huge installed base of software makes repeat sales easy
The growing clout of Open Source options is a threat to its flagship Windows Server
High levels of piracy continue to affect bottomline
You can’t keep the world’s largest software company out of the big league
for too long—Microsoft Corp India is back in the
DQ Top 20 list, with revenues rising 18% to Rs 788 crore (DQ estimates). While
growth in real terms vis-à-vis software sales was a lukewarm 3%, the inclusion
of revenues from Microsoft’s India Development Center (DQ estimates of Rs 30
crore) and MNC OEM revenues beefed up the final tally.
Microsoft software continued to rule the desktop space, though high piracy
levels began to affect the bottomline. The company launched several initiatives
together with industry associations like Nasscom, CII and BSA to control
software piracy by educating users and cracking down on offenders.
In the enterprise segment, the company had some good news—its Exchange
Server was ranked number one in marketshare terms by IDC. The company also
convinced a few big corporates to switch to the Windows XP bandwagon.
The main cause for worry for the company is the falling prices of PCs in the
country—a telling indicator of unbundling by all desktop vendors. The other
threat to the company comes from Linux, as enterprises—and more importantly
teams behind big-ticket e-governance projects—began to look at the Open Source
option seriously. Though the company continues to play down the Linux threat, it
followed a worldwide strategy shift and agreed to share source code for its
software for the first time in India, although with only one and yet unnamed
government body.
Chairman Bill Gates’ India visit in November saw him announce investments
of Rs 2,000 crore by 2005. Of this figure, Rs 500 crore will go toward Microsoft’s
India Development Center in Hyderabad.
There wasn’t much activity on product launches in 2002-03, though MS did
introduce two key ERP applications in the Indian market—Axapta and Navision.
The much-awaited Tablet PC was launched amongst much fanfare late last year, but
failed to make an impact. By the end of the fiscal, the company geared up for
the launch of its Windows Server 2003. Simultaneously, two more upgrades were
announced for a launch—Visual Studio.NET 2003 and the 64-bit edition of SQL
Server 2000.
