Bangalore: Bagging one of the largest cloud engagement services, Microsoft beats Google and IBM in providing online apps service to about 7.5 million students and professors across India. The technical colleges all over India that come under All India Council For Technical Education (AICTE) will get to experience the online software and services provided by Microsoft. The knowledge parting tool called Live@edu suite which is based on the cloud concept. This will include Outlook Live, Office Live, and 25 GB per user of SkyDrive cloud storage. Under Microsoft's educational software program, this service will be provided free of cost. The suite is vast and demands a management console which will be also provided Microsoft. This online service will be hosted by Microsoft through its number of data centers that it has across the globe. The Management console will help IT admins to at the organization deploy the software to students and professors through Active Directory, establish policies like single sign-on, and integrate the software with other cloud services. Though this service was launched to mint no revenues but was a noble cause, biggies like IBM and Google had also pitched their cloud services to AICTE. Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's VP for worldwide education, in an interview. "Many of the schools are very remote and it's hard to physically deploy software to those campuses and schools; that's one of the benefits of the cloud," as quoted by Paul McDougall for Information Week. "Microsoft's cloud platform will make for a truly progressive ecosystem and contribute to the country's technical education by providing a better communication and collaboration platform for institutes and students," said AICTE chairman S.S. Mantha.