The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : ‘Make SMEs more healthy’

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Thursday, Dec 17, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

‘Make SMEs more healthy’

Staff Reporter

Photo: M. Balaji

Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman of Microsoft India, at an interactive meet in Tirupur on Wednesday. —

Tirupur: Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) are the engines of job creation in our country’s economy and hence, there is every need to make the SMEs more ‘healthy’ through IT-based solutions for better supply chain management, according to Microsoft India Chairman Ravi Venkatesan.

“High degree of correlation between IT and SMEs are evident from the studies that second highest return on investment for SMEs come from IT after the investment on machineries,” he said.

Mr. Venkatesan was speaking at the launch of the online-hosted enterprise solutions offered by Microsoft and Tirupur Exporters Association to the SMEs in the Tirupur cluster, here on Wednesday.

The web-enabled solutions were designed under the ‘Project Vikas’ scheme initiated by Microsoft in partnership with the National Manufacturing Competitive Council way back in 2007.

The G-Tech Info Solutions, a special purpose vehicle, would monitor the implementation of the new solutions.

Mr. Venkatesan said that under this online software solutions package, SMEs could chose from ‘Online desktop’, ‘Hosted e-mail’ on the platform and ‘Unified Communications’ extended on platforms offered by Airtel, Global Outlook and Wipro, respectively.

“The Tirupur knitwear cluster has thus become the first of its kind in the country to get this type of IT solution which will enable cost-effective communication with greater flexibility in a single interface and give users the freedom of sharing data,” he added. He expressed the hope that the new venture would trigger IT revolution in the cluster.

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