Business Daily (Nairobi)
Kui Kinyanjui
21 September 2007
Technology giant IBM has released a new range of software products that allows users to perform functions free of charge, piling additional pressure on software giant Microsoft Inc.
The IBM Lotus Symphony is a suite of free software tools that enables users to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The company says it had developed the product to cater for the increasingly mobile and flexible software users.
"With the Open Document Format, businesses can make their operations universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways," said Steve Mills, senior vice-president and group executive of IBM Software Group.
Introduction of this new suite means that Kenyan companies and individual computer users now have access to alternative forms of software and the possibility of cutting technology costs by up to one third of the present value.
For years, Kenyan software pirates have devised methods to avoid buying pricey software from Microsoft. Pirating enables users to save as much as 70 per cent of software costs, according to the Kenya Copyright Board.
To secure a single user licence for Microsoft's Office products, Kenyan companies spend as much as Sh15,000. But with IBM's offering all they have to do is to pay the cost of downloading the software.
"IBM is a trusted name in the industry and its offering widens the borders of user freedom in the software market.
A number of companies have been migrating to IBM's Lotus products for security reasons and should welcome the free Office software," said Manish Shah, a software dealer at a local IT services company.
IBM, which is directly challenging Microsoft's dominance of the document, spreadsheet and presentations software market, says it is targeting multiple users from the business, academic, government and consumer communities.
The software, which can also create PDF files, can be downloaded from the company's website. "Its tools can be used to extend a business process or custom application to create dynamic composite applications," he said. The tools, which support Windows and Linux desktops, are designed to handle majority of office productivity tasks.
The new software is in line with IBM's company strategy to identify new ways to allow users to interact with each other and promote easier movement of information within an organisation.
IBM started its push towards offering free software seven years ago, when it became an early adopter of open-source software, backing its drive by integrating open-source into software, and creating avenues for the support and development of the software.
That support has now placed the company on competitive footing with Microsoft in the enterprise area, where IBM now compares favourably with Microsoft's Windows server software.
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