Dubai: Telecom operator du said on Wednesday it is eyeing a bigger share of the small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) by forming a partnership with Microsoft to offer cloud-based Office 365 applications.

There are between 250,000 and 300,000 businesses in the UAE and out of that 98 per cent are SMBs.

“We are offering all the services they require from one supplier and will become the IT department for SMBs as this sector is looking for better value for money,” Fahad Al Hassawi, chief commercial officer at du, told Gulf News.

Du controls 30 per cent of the SMBs in the UAE while the rest is controlled by etisalat.

“We have a lot of room to grow. We have partnerships with Apple, Cisco and Google for enterprise segment. We become the first telecom provider in the UAE to offer Office 365,” he said.

Hany Fahmy Aly, executive vice-president of enterprise business at du, said that SMBs represent the fastest growing segment for us and they contribute 40 per cent to Dubai’s GDP (gross domestic product).

“We recognise the challenges faced by them, and from our experience we have seen that they are early technology adopters, if products are packaged right. By offering the packages across all mobile and broadband services with Microsoft, our SMB customers will benefit from yet another incredible effort to bring value-packed, enterprise-grade solutions to this market,” he said.

Essential service

The offering provides SMBs with “increased accessibility to cloud-based productivity tools” starting from Dh20 per month for essential service to Dh180 for bundled services. SMBs can benefit with no infrastructure set-up or costs on up to 15 devices per user with any operating system, and remain “productive on the go without having to pay any IT infrastructure costs,” Aly said.

The variety of services include business-class email, shared calendars, instant messaging, conferencing, and access to 1TB of storage in the cloud, which is due to become unlimited over the course of 2015. This is all in addition to the Microsoft Office suite.

According to IDC (International Data Corporation), software spending in the UAE in preparation for Expo 2020 is expected to increase by 4.5 per cent.

Ihsan Anabtawi, regional manager for Microsoft Office Division at Microsoft Gulf, said that Office 365 is one of our fastest growing commercial products globally and regionally.

“Our model has always been to work with local partners and over 90 per cent of our business is through partnerships. Today it is with non-traditional partner — telecom operator. The partnership will reach new levels of reach and scale. It gives us a new dimension which we did not have before,” he said.

About 95 per cent of tech-savvy SMBs globally use Office compared to 43 per cent Office usage among SMBs using little technology.

Aly said that SMB customers have limited budget, which means he has to put money in his core business. “Even if he has the budget, he cannot afford to hire an IT expert to tell him which technology to go for. This is where we come in. We want to be the one stop IT expert for SMBs.”