Bhubaneshwar excited on Office 365

Bhubaneshwar

The Tech Caravan series, being organized in conjunction with Microsoft and Canon reached the eastern state of Odisha on August 21^st at Hotel Empires in Bhubaneshwar. Notwithstanding, a channel roadshow being organized by one of the biggest hardware OEMs on the same evening at another hotel, the overwhelming turnout (45 partners) at the Tech Caravan once more reconfirmed the pulling powers of Microsoft, Canon, and The DQ Week.

The program kicked off with Rajneesh De, editor, The DQ Week, giving an introductory speech on the relevance of offerings like Office 365 when the delivery model is undergoing a transformation  and also how The DQ Week has been providing a platform to bridge the gap and address the concerns between partners and vendors.

Sanjay Kathuria, partner, channel development manager, Microsoft talked about Office 365—Microsoft’s cloud offering—and why it would be beneficial for partners to focus on selling online services. He emphasized on the benefits of this model over the perpetual licensing model like automatic updates, worry free IT with 99.9% financially backed SLA among others.  More importantly, he also illustrated the profitability under this service and promised the assembled partners higher margins.

Office 365 refers to subscription plans that include access to Office applications plus other productivity services that are enabled over the Internet (cloud services), such as Lync web conferencing and Exchange Online hosted email for business, and additional online storage with SkyDrive.

With most prominent partners of Bhubaneshwar including the likes of Printlink, SA Infosystems, E Square, Ashirbad Computers as well as the local IT association ITAO secretary Dayanand Ratho and treasurer Satyajit Panda appreciative of Microsoft’s Offce 365 offering, what ensured was a fruitful discussion during the evening which hopefully would prove to be mutually beneficial.

The Microsoft and Ingram Micro teams from Kolkata and Bhubenshwar were introduced who would be working with the partners for support and sales related issues.