Mumbai, India — For a country that is known for moving on a fast-track with tech innovations with its enormous population — should soon have improved access to Google Apps. Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant Google Inc. has entered in to partnership deal with Tata Communications to provide cloud-based collaborative business connectivity applications that provide email, instant messaging, calendar functionality, video and office presentation tools for companies across India, where a fast-expanding economy throws up new opportunities.
“Tata Communications is joining hands with Google to deliver the Google Apps bundle of web-based office productivity applications to businesses in India,’ according to Tata Communications representative said in a statement.
“The companies would work together to provide a bundle of business tools, powered by Google Apps, such as email, instant messaging, calendar functionality, video and office presentations over the Internet, which represents a significant advance by both companies to bring value-added applications to Indian enterprises while offering localized pricing, billing and support,” the companies said in a statement.
Tata describes that the service is simple to subscribe, easy to use and streamlines the complexities of IT, while allowing businesses to pay for only what they need. The collaboration leverages Tata Communication’s market presence and expertise in India with Google’s innovative offerings to provide easily accessible business applications, they added.
It further states that Indian businesses, especially the budding enterprises, will now have expanded access to Tata Communications’ cloud-based software services, helping them migrate their IT requirements to a pay-as-you-use business model.
“The portfolio will relieve organizations to reduce IT cost and complexity and be more productive. It will be especially helpful for companies with fast growing professionals, offices spread all over the country, or staff who travel frequently,” says the company.
“The unfurling of this service is an indication of the coming together of two global entities to transform the way enterprises communicate and collaborate, both within their own organizations, and moreover with their partner and customer ecosystems,” states David Wirt, senior vice president and global head of managed services at Tata Communications.
Tata Communications states that this partnership emphasizes the company’s focus on extending services to speedily growing markets by leveraging its tier one network across Asia, SA and the Middle East.
“For nascent markets, where enterprises are more cost-sensitive, the subscription-based pricing, rapid deployment, and lower “exit costs” offered by the SaaS [software as a service] model sometimes make SaaS the only viable option.”
That sounds promising. With such an extensive reach of Tata, Google would not exactly have to ignite a lack of awareness, since the spokesperson cited Springboard Research’s 2009 finding that 95 percent of Asian organizations are familiar with SaaS and Saas-based applications, including CRM [customer relationship management], ERP [enterprise resource planning], storage, Web conferencing and e-mail, are the most popular applications among cloud users and constitute the bulk of cloud-related spending.
India is viewed as the fastest-growing market for SaaS in the Asia-Pacific region, as well. It estimated to register a growth of 60% compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2012.
Dave Girouard, president, enterprise, Google said, “’We are delighted to be working with Tata Communications and look forward to years of close collaboration and ongoing innovation. Our interests in serving Indian businesses are complementary. We are confident that this offering will help reduce their IT cost and complexity. Not only will organizations avoid the traditional challenges of managing on-premise technologies, but they can give their workers anytime, anywhere access to the communication tools and information they need to get their jobs done.”
The service will streamline business setup and reduce maintenance without the need for additional hardware or software. It will be accessed via the Tata Communications website over a web browser or smartphone and will provide secure, real-time collaboration among workgroups of all sizes. Orders can currently be placed through the customer facing sales team.
Tata says that analysts are saying 2010 is the year that companies will take on cloud computing, following a dormant year of IT spending.
“Adoption of cloud computing across the Asia Pacific region, excluding Japan, will spike in 2010, according to IDC, with spending on IT cloud services growing almost threefold and reaching $42 billion by 2012 in Asia Pacific.”
While Microsoft and International Business Machines Corp reign over the market for enterprise email, Google is trying to convince businesses to switch to its so-called cloud-based services, in which software is accessed over the Internet.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in April the company had a couple of million enterprise customers for the Google Apps software suite and was adding about 3,000 businesses per day.
Regrettably, Google and Tata Communications did not disclose any sort of time-frame for the expansion, nor provided any details of the current partnership.