Microsoft to the rescue in tough times

 MUMBAI, INDIA: Microsoft India launched an IT Knowledge resource for organizations to streamline operational costs—www.controlcosts.com.

This step has been taken in a move to help organizations to leverage technology to drive costs and improve efficiencies.

“The global economic meltdown has forced companies across the globe and in India to look for ways to cut costs and reduce risks as they confront issues like tighter credit, reduced business activity, and slower consumer spending, while maintaining business agility. We believe that technology provides powerful tools that can help companies reduce costs by enabling them to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, automate processes, and to do more with fewer resources,” said Rajan Anandan, MD, Microsoft India.

For instance, using Microsoft CRM solution, Liliput Retail has been able to increase efficiencies of its warehouses by 60 percent and also maintain a healthy turnover rate. Similarly, Lavassa Corporation has reduced response time to customer queries from one day to immediate action and has saved 20 percent in payroll by streamlining the sales operation with CRM solutions from Microsoft.

According to a McKinsey report of 2008, targeted IT investments can make operations more efficient and increase revenues, delivering returns larger than simple cost cutting measures typically do. As Roger Killick, IT Manager, Siemens Standard Devices believes, “Hyper-V gives us all the virtualization features we need in a very cost-effective package. It's an excellent investment, because we'll also save money on future training and support costs.”

With controlcosts.com, Microsoft aims to provide one stop for CFOs, CIOs and CXOs to learn how to identify high cost operations and streamline costs by leveraging technology solutions such as virtualization, unified communications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence and hosted services.