| Micro Effect: Microsoft led the way with a growth of 30% Most of the biggies did well last year, with Microsoft leading the way with
revenues of around Rs 1,100 crore, as compared to Rs 853 crore in FY 2003-04, a
growth of 30%. The company has not made much money from the consumer markets
just as yet (the segment contributed 5% to its revenues). But this is an area
where hardware is still growing faster than software. Microsoft found big growth
in the banking and financial vertical, which grew two to three times. There was
substantial growth in education too with fixed deployments happening in the
schools of Gujarat, Punjab, Delhi as also the North-East.
In the banking and government sectors, the predominantly selling software was
the server OS database. This is the company's fastest growing segment, the
second fastest being the productivity suite. With companies deploying new
applications at a much more rapid pace, the server software growth has
registered a much faster growth than the desktop infrastructure. Implementation
of core-banking rollouts by institutions like the Bank of Baroda and Bank of
India, reinstated the fact that public sector banks are now moving from a very
de-centralized to a centralized infrastructure-something that is also driving
Microsoft revenues. Its productivity suit grew 25%, the server growth being
around 35-40%.
The uptake for ISA servers for managing network and security was close to
200% but it still remains a very small business for the company. For every
Windows server Microsoft sells, many of these servers are attached, enhancing
and making the infrastructure a lot more sophisticated. This 'value-add' is
about 2-3% of Microsoft's revenues in India as against 12% in the US-demonstrating
how nascent the market is. Similarly, the BizTalk server for application
integration saw a 200% growth, but again has a small base. The personal software
market would refuse to grow but there is a silver lining. Derived products like
gaming are showing huge growth-at about 150% a year. Though not a growth
driver per se, the market for it is fast maturing.
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