HONG KONG, May 14, 2002 — Microsoft Asia Pacific today announced that more than 12 million customers have been licensed for Microsoft Office XP in the Asia Pacific region (including Japan, Australia and New Zealand) since the product was launched in May 2001. This figure represents a threefold increase in customer licenses compared with the number of Office 2000 licenses sold in the Asia Pacific during a comparable time frame. Overall, Asia Pacific Office XP licenses made up 20% of the 60 million licenses issued worldwide for the latest version of Microsofts productivity suite in the same period.
“In this era of intense IT budget scrutiny, companies in the Asia Pacific are seeing value in Office XP as a critical part of their business strategy, said Michael Rawding, President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Microsoft Corporation. The level of investment we are seeing validates our conviction that Office XP increases business productivity, delivers business value and new solutions opportunities for businesses, like no other desktop software.”
Why Organizations Are Adopting Office XP
Organizations throughout the Asia Pacific region are choosing to deploy Office XP to enable more efficient content creation and collaboration, and to take advantage of customized business applications developed on the Office XP platform by solutions partners and other independent software vendors.
For instance, JR East Japan Information Systems Company (JEIS) has been deploying Office XP together with Windows XP Professional since November 2001. They have seen the advantages from implementing the XP desktop simultaneously. Adopting Office XP on the Windows XP Pro operating system has enabled JEIS to significantly improve user support efficiency through remote assistance, system recovery and SharePoint Team Services for their internal Helpdesk systems. JEIS has also customized the Smart Tag feature and integrated it into the companys business applications and cooperative systems, on an XML base, from each of the Office XP applications.
Sonata Software Ltd. is a solutions partner based in Bangalore, India. The company has developed a comprehensive portal solution called WorXPace based on Office XP and SharePoint technologies. WorXPace provides a single point of access to information, collaboration, business process automation and business intelligence to organizations with large sales forces and integrated sales and marketing processes. WorXPace, which is currently being implemented by Sonatas sister company, Sonata Info Tech Ltd., is capable of increasing sales force productivity by 25% and is estimated to generate up to 200% return on investment after the first year of full deployment.
“With Office XP, our experience is that the development time for collaborative productivity solutions has been reduced by 30% to 40%,” said R. Balasubramanian, Vice-President, Sonata Software Limited.
“We have taken advantage of all Microsoft Office XP features in the solution we developed, making it both rich and easy to use. The Indian language capability and Smart Tag feature are extremely powerful and useful. The training requirements for the end users who are going to use WorXPace are almost negligible, as most of them are familiar with the Microsoft Office User Interface.”
Sonatas WorXPace solution was awarded first place during the Microsoft Asia Productivity eXPerience Solutions Challenge partner event organized last month.
BSME Holborn Computer Resources, Ltd., another solutions partner based in Hong Kong, has developed the BSME Holborn Financial Management System (FMS) solution, leveraging the unique features of Office XP, including Smart Tag, web components and real-time data. This solution has enabled their customer – the Martally Group – flexible access to financial documents on or off-line and has accelerated the companys month-end accounting process.
“Using Office XPs highly extensible architecture as our platform shortened our development of BSME Holborn Financial Management System by at least 40%,” said Patrick Lee, Director, BSME Holborn Computer Resources, Ltd.
Knowledge eXPerience Portal has been developed by Malaysian solutions partner Computer Systems Advisers (CSA) . The solution is a comprehensive knowledge management portal that centralizes information and streamlines automated approval workflow with ISO 9001 compliance forms on-line. By implementing and deploying this solution to manage internal administrative processes, Elken Sdn Bhd, a leading direct selling company in Malaysia, can now increase staff productivity, saving over US$50,000 a year in manpower costs.
About Office XP
Office XP provides a much smarter work experience for individuals, teams and organizations. It makes productivity simple for individuals by helping them get the most out of Office and giving them tools they can rely on. Office XP enables collaboration for everyone by revolutionizing the way people work with others on documents and introducing SharePoint Team Services to manage projects and activities via the Web. Office XP also provides a flexible way to solve business needs by delivering rich business solutions and improved security and reliability tools businesses need to deploy and manage Office.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, SharePoint and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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