We will remain committed to India from a market perspective and will stay focused on delivering innovative products and solutions to deliver on our commitment to the customer experience.

In the past mostly large enterprises and upper mid-market organizations have focused on building data centers for their critical infrastructure workloads and business applications. Large enterprises have gone a step further to have DR sites for their data centers as part of business continuity initiative.

This market has seen a double digit growth over the last few years but growth has slowed down due to consolidation and current economic conditions. 

On your growth plans for the FY '09-10

Overall, 2008 has been a reasonably good year for the IT industry in ?India, despite the worldwide economic downturn. There's no doubt that the current economic situation presents difficult challenges for businesses of all kinds, in every industry. We at Microsoft see these tough economic times as an opportunity to engage in richer conversations with customers around how we can help them manage their costs by bringing enhanced levels of efficiencies and effectiveness by optimal use of IT. We take a long-term approach to our global business growth and continue to execute against our business plan. With Indian customers continuing to reiterate their confidence in Microsoft's platforms and solutions, our performance in 2008 has been on track not just with strong product and solutions announcements but also equally powerful customer momentum across sectors like BFSI, retail, manufacturing, and telecom. We will remain committed to India from a market perspective and will stay focused on delivering innovative products and solutions to deliver on our commitment to the customer experience.

Going forward, the following trends are likely to prevail in the market for the cost optimization that they deliver:

• Reduced travel and communication costs: Cutting back on plane trips and hotel stays is one of the most obvious ways for companies to save money, but that must be balanced against the value of person-to-person interaction. Today, video conferencing and new collaboration tools are transforming virtual meetings into face-to-face interactions and companies are finding that in many cases, information sharing and collaboration can be accomplished more efficiently and for much less cost when done virtually.
• Going virtual: Virtualization makes it possible to run more than one operating system on a single machine, which can help companies reduce costs by enabling them to use more of the computing power than they already own. Virtualization also presents opportunities to consolidate the number of server companies own and use.
• Using business intelligence: Business intelligence delivers on a simple promise'to improve business performance by driving better decision making throughout your organization. BI helps the customer make better and quicker fact based decisions, enables all types of decision making in the organization- operational, tactical, or strategic; lowers TCO, gets deployed fast, and scales with the customer requirements in addition to enabling decision making at all levels of the organization-personal, team, or organization wide.
• Leveraging cloud computing: Many companies are beginning to consider the benefits of a Software as a Service model for their IT environments as a potential cost saving strategy, which provides the flexibility and options to customers to help them make educated decisions. To save costs customers will now start exploring options to see how they can manage and access software, whether it's online, on-premises, or both.
• CRM solutions: CRM offers a robust suite of sales, marketing, and service capabilities, it offers businesses of all sizes a fast, flexible, and affordable solution for finding, winning, and growing profitable customer relationships.