Microsoft Office Business Platform Group senior vice president Kurt Delbene said yesterday that Taiwan’s future in cloud computing lay in mobility and internationalization of developed products and applications.
At a “Software and Services” media briefing yesterday, Delbene disclosed that Microsoft currently supports more than 100 engineers in its proprietary research and development (R&D) center in Taipei.
The company is leveraging heavily on local engineering talents as it embarks on this next movement in information technology.
“We want to enable all types of user interfaces for our clients. Imagine the scenario where employees can move from Office on the desktop to Office on Web to Office on mobile [phones], and back and forth, while allowing team members from various locations to collaborate remotely and seamlessly,” Delbene said to reporters.
Such mobile phone-based productivity enabling smooth data transfer is precisely what local engineers are good at, Eric Yeh (葉光釗), from Microsoft’s Taiwan R&D laboratory, said at the same briefing.
“Moreover, internationalization or globalization of Microsoft products for worldwide users, such as language inputs and common theme implementation, is another strong point of Taiwan’s IT advantage,” Yeh said.
Microsoft introduced the Windows Azure platform recently, which incorporates Windows Live, Office Live, Microsoft Dynamic Client Relationship Management Online and SharePoint Online.
This suite of Live products and services allows corporations of any size to scale their operations and choose which core services to move to the clouds, which ones to keep on premise, as well as who gets what access, and when.
In Taiwan’s economic landscape — filled with many small to medium-sized enterprises as well as many thriving software developers — the Windows Azure platform offers a scalable software application based on the number of employees and usage volume per month. Hence, no initial heavy costs are needed to put together an IT department, Yeh said.
Moreover, by moving technologies into the clouds, these developers can introduce their applications to a wider audience that they would otherwise never come across because of limited sales and marketing resources, Yeh said.
In an age of severe corporate downsizing, Microsoft is providing its clients the ability to free up locations, workers and data storage, while maintaining the same level of efficiency. Delbene said some of the software giant’s newest clients were Autodesk Inc, Coca-Cola Co, Ingersoll-Rand Co and Energizer Battery Co.
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