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News >> Technology >>
Sun's StarOffice 7 makes a debut in India
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 04 December 2003, 20:30 IST
BANGALORE: Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of the latest version of its office productivity suite StarOffice 7 in India, as it firmly sets its sights on denting the one vendor show in the desktop computing market. The launch was kicked off at an event hosted by Sun for its customers.
StarOffice 7 Office Suite is a complete, feature-rich and affordable office productivity suite, comparable to Microsoft Office. StarOffice 7 software offers functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format. It also introduces the new StarOffice Configuration Manager, the StarOffice Software Development Kit, a macro recorder, and support for assisting technologies, as well as for complex text layouts, claims a company press release. The latest StarOffice software is multi-platform, available on the Solaris Operating Environment, Linux, and Microsoft Windows platforms, and supports 10 languages. Most importantly, for millions of potential customers in the country the follow-on to last year's impressive StarOffice 6.0 starts at less than one-sixth the cost of Microsoft Office 2003.
Commenting on the launch of StarOffice 7 in India, K Sugumaran, Regional Director- Asia South, Volume Products, Sun Microsystems said, " With the launch of StarOffice 7 today, we are truly poised to make a huge dent in the office productivity suite market. We have incorporated several new features into this suite to further make it attractive to customers worldwide and we are already seeing a big movement away from proprietary office productivity suites. India represents a huge opportunity for StarOffice 7 and we fully plan to leverage the great price-performance ratio of StarOffice 7 to penetrate this market in a big way".
Apart from its lower price, one of the greatest advantages of StarOffice over Microsoft Office is its cross-platform support. Where Office 2003 will run only on Windows 2000 and XP, StarOffice supports Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP, as well as Linux and Solaris. "The latest office productivity suite is further testimony to our commitment to open standards and supporting multi-vendor and multi platform environments" added Mr. Sugumaran.
StarOffice software is set to meet the day-to-day office productivity needs for a variety of users, from Governments and Global 2000 corporations to medium-sized business to small businesses, home offices, home users and students. StarOffice software and OpenOffice.org together are the leading office productivity suites in the world on Linux and the Solaris OS.
"In a scenario where enterprises are looking to bring down costs and increase productivity, we expect StarOffice 7 to emerge as a viable option. Over the last few months we have seen our previous version of StarOffice 6.0 make substantial inroads into the Indian market across segments like corporations, home users and government," said K P Unnikrishnan, Country Head, Marketing, Sun Microsystems India. "By using StarOffice 7, enterprises can cut down on licenses to two-third of their present costs. India, one of the most price sensitive markets in the Asian region is expected to be one of the largest potential markets for StarOffice 7 and we are confident of capturing a large share of office productivity market going forward" added Unnikrishnan.
Sun Microsystems Indias aggressive thrust on its StarOffice 6.0 over the past few months has yielded major success with many large organizations deploying StarOffice in their offices with some of them even replacing other Office suites. The roster of StarOffice users, of versions 6.0 and 5.2, in India includes leading banks like HDFC Bank, BPOs like ICICI One Source, new economy companies like Apnaloan, corporations like JK Corp, government organizations like Karnataka PWD, Department of IT-Karnataka, select government schools and colleges and also defense organizations to name a few. The government sector, the biggest spender on IT in India, is also looking at StarOffice seriously and StarOffice 7 is expected to make further inroad into this sector.