Airtel to offer MS Office on mobiles

Bharti Airtel, telecom services provider, has announced a strategic tie-up with Microsoft with the launch of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 platform that provides an opportunity to all Airtel customers to access corporate email via direct push technology.

The Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 platform offers a host of applications. All Airtel users will now have access to MS office (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer), multi-media functionality (camera, MP3, video recording) and Line of Business applications like Sales Force Automation on their mobile phones.
Speaking at the launch of this new service, Bharti Airtel president Manoj Kohli said, “With the launch of this services as part of Airtel’s strategic innovation strategy, we have become the first operator in India to offer this technology to our customers. The service will deliver business applications and multimedia experience to all enterprise and SME customers across India.”

He added, “This tie-up also gives us the opportunity to tap into the estimated four million SME market share in India. The familiar MS Windows user interface would be a big advantage for users. This is a huge opportunity with a large enterprise segment running predominantly on the MS Exchange server.”

Elaborating on Microsoft’s value proposition for customers, Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan, said, “The launch of Windows Mobile 5.0 is in line with our stated vision of creating People Ready Businesses. Windows Mobile 5.0 is the perfect solution for the global mobile workforce to work in an ‘always on’ environment and better organize their work and personal lives. The alliance with Bharti Airtel reflects the synergy between two industry leaders, both focused at innovating to help individuals realize their true potential. With this association Bharti Airtel thus joins 115 existing mobile operators who currently offer the Windows Mobile solution worldwide.”

Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 will be available to Airtel customers on the latest HP I-Paq and I-Mate handsets. The handsets are priced in the range of Rs 16,000 – Rs 65,000. Airtel enterprise customers will also get the benefit of preferential hand-set pricing. There are three price points for accessing the service Rs 399, Rs 599 and Rs 799 depending on the amount of data downloaded. A dedicated after-sales support, owing to the back-to-back SLA with all its partners would also be there to service the customers. The company also announced Infosys as its first enterprise customer for this service.