My recent interactions with SMEs in India have brought some
of the most interesting findings to the table. It is their willingness to stop
piracy by using Office 365 thereby making use of SaaS (subscription based payment
on monthly basis). Further digging into this, I found two very important
observations.
Firstly, they are excited with O365 offerings that has latest
version of Office, 24x7 e-mail, Lync and on top of that having an access to
SharePoint. These applications were initially considered to be the prerogative
of large companies only and the small user was not considered to be enterprise
user. Many of these small companies say that it has become lot easier for them
to run their business without any overhead of IT and compliance issues. It is
good to see that the same very community that once used to be leader in
innovative ways to do piracy is now thinking differently. There was a time when
they did not bother about updates and new features and were happy using
whatever was loaded in their PC by the vendor who assembled their PC.
Secondly, many of them have stopped using Google Docs and
now coming back to Microsoft Office due to its flexibility and very reasonable
pricing of O365. My previous impression was that, only medium and large
companies are going for O365 for very obvious reasons but now it seems that its
popularity is trickling down to very small businesses as well, including
individual users. As internet is becoming cheaper and faster day by day, we all
know that SaaS is the next big thing but why would someone already using free
services by Google Docs switch to paid O365. This is an interesting fact for
which one of the reasons I feel is that world was always more familiar with MS
Office than Google Docs and they always wanted to go back to MS office. That is
where O365 has played a major role.
Does this mean that definition of enterprise user is now
changing because irrespective of size and scale, everyone is now using same
software to run their businesses? What is the new definition of the enterprise
software or for that matter enterprise user? To me it seems that gradually the
word “Enterprise Software” will disappear and it will get replaced with a new
name…..”APP for Business”