Sabeer Bhatia co-founded InstaColl launches online Office suite
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 21 November 2007, 20:30 IST
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Mumbai: Bangalore based InstaColl, co- founded by Sabeer Bhatia, Sumanth Raghavendra and Kaushal Cavale, today launched Live Documents, a hybrid online-offline Office suite of applications offering functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. "Microsoft has not kept pace with the way people have been working around the world. For instance, no new graphs have been introduced in Microsoft Excel since its launch. The launch of Live Documents will fill all the gaps that Microsoft has not worked on," said Sumanth Raghavendra, CEO, InstaColl. InstaColl is doing a controlled release but within the next two to three weeks it will be available to everyone across the globe. Individual users can access this for free for some time till the company decides on the pricing. However, the enterprise version will be charged. The company already has Aricent (earlier known an Flextronics) as its first enterprise client. Almost 7,000 employees of Aricent will be using this application. "The pricing will be minimal even for enterprises, as low as $50 for the full year or $10 per month. Volumes can always bring down the price further. Live Documents will allow companies to cut cost. A single Microsoft Office will cost anything from Rs 11,000-15,000 per user. With this we are posing a challenge to a significant chunk of their revenues," said Sabeer Bhatia, Chairman, InstaColl. Based using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allows user to view and edit documents with any common browser on any operating system from anywhere. The application also allows collaboration on real-time basis. The company claims that almost 3,000 people can collaborate together on a single document on real-time basis. When a user is online any changes made on the document are immediately synchronised on the server. Everytime a person is using the application offline, all the changes will be synchronised once they are online. It can be run on mobile handsets also provided the handset can support Flash. Currently the offline version is available only if the user has a Windows operating system. In six months time however, the company will launch a desktop version also. However, it can be used on Linux, and Mac machines.

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