|
Brief
Live-Documents aims to take on Microsoft and Google
Sabeer Bhatia |
Bangalore based Instacoll has developed an online office suite
which provides rich features with collaboration and aims to compete with global
leader in the office tools space.
Moving on from the success of Hotmail and failure of Aarzoo,
Sabeer Bhatia is all set to take on Microsoft and Google with a new online Office
suite which is a look-a like of Microsoft’s Office 2007 and competes with
Google docs due to its online format. Developed by Bangalore based software
firm Instacoll, this product which is online on www.live-documents.com is aiming
to be a world class office product developed completely out of India. “Ten
years ago Hotmail changed the way we e-mail and I expect a similar revolution
in the office documents space with the help of this product which will allow
hundreds of users to collaborate online,” said Sabeer Bhatia, Chairman,
Instacoll. The company had got the funding from SoftBank China and India Holdings
that has recently started operations in India and have already funded few companies
in the country.
Live Documents offers applications with functionality equivalent to Word, Excel
and PowerPoint which are built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex.
Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any browser on
any operating system from anywhere. It uses a Flash-based user interface. This
suite is online and claims to have a much richer interface than Google docs
and comes with many features such as security which adds user access control
as the most prominent feature. It allows you to dynamically change permissions
for better control over documents. “Since this is an online product based
on XML, it can support all the file formats and a document written in one format
can easily be read by others irrespective of the browser or machine they are
sitting on,” explained Sumanth Raghvendra, CEO and co-founder, Instacoll.
He added that it is easily scalable online as it uses clustered environment
and is horizontally scalable so in-case of heavy usage, Instacoll can just add
on new servers and increase the capacity.
This suite even has an online plug-in version which can embed with your existing
office product and can be used to synchronize documents with online version
conveniently. Live-documents services will be available for free for personal
users but will come at a minimal price for corporate users which will be in
the range of $50 per year who will get some additional features in the area
of security. Instacoll will be offering 100 MB of space initially to all and
in case of additional space being required, the user can buy it. The first commercial
enterprise version of Live Documents will be deployed at Aricent, which is an
independent communications software company with over 6,700 employees globally.
In terms of expansion plans, Bhatia is not sure of adopting an ad based revenue
model as he is aware of Google’s scanning of documents for ads which violates
privacy. Talking about the future, he said “We will be making a desktop
client version of the same suite within six months which will remove the need
for any third party office suite for synchronization with the online version.”
If this product takes off, it will certainly ruffle the feathers of Microsoft
and Google management to some extent and we can surely expect to see customers
benefit from this. But before that, Instacoll will even have to compete with
a recent startup in the form of zoho.com which is providing similar services
with added features to global customers and is fully functional which is not
the case with Live-Documents.
|
