The DQ Week kicks off Tech Caravan from Jammu

The DQ week flagged off its first event of the year, the annual ‘Tech Caravan' series, from Jammu.

The event was held at the hotel Asia on January 18 with a footfall of at least 40 resellers from the IT business. Microsoft was the sponsor of this event.

The program kicked off with Rajneesh De, editor, The DQ Week, giving an introductory speech on the issues relating Jammu market and how the newspaper has been providing a platform to bridge the gap and address those concerns.

Following this, Ashutosh Pal, regional head, Microsoft talked about Office 365--a cloud product-in an attempt to persuade partners to focus on selling online services. He stated the benefits over the perpetual licensing model like automatic updates, worry free IT with 99.9% financially backed SLA among others.

Pal also ensured the profitability under this service and promised margins up to 25%.

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 , according to its website. Recently, Microsoft has also put advertisements in newspapers and promised six times the margin on selling office 365.

Later, some of the partners expressed their concerns on the overall IT market scenario and also questioned the viability of Office 365 product amid weak support from Microsoft to the partners, in Jammu.

However, Pal promised of immediate action from his geo-expansion team.

Area sales manager of Savex Computers, one of the distributors, also spoke on the challenges of this market. He said, "Jammu being a small market there is little unpredictability from the demand side and catering to this is a problem. However, this can be solved if Jammu can be a billing point, which is not at present."

There is also no logistics from them, he added.