New marketplace gives businesses subscription-based, self-service access to business applications
Singapore, 20 August 2014 – StarHub unveils “SmartBusiness”, a new cloud marketplace that brings together a range of cloud applications, including Microsoft Office 365 and McAfee Endpoint Protection, in a way that delivers a simple and easy experience for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) to buy these software and services.
SmartBusiness also provides a gateway for partners such as Microsoft and McAfee as well as independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Deskera and Webnic to make available their applications rapidly to the local SMB base.
As applications are hosted in the cloud on SmartBusiness, SMB employees are empowered to access these applications and complete their work anywhere, anytime; this way, they do not have to work in the confines of their office. With the software-as-a-service model, SMBs pay monthly only for the applications or services they need without having to make any upfront IT cost or worry about upgrade cost later. In addition, self-service access to applications allows SMBs to enjoy the convenience of managing their subscriptions according to their company needs and size, monitoring application usage as well as having an overview of subscription costs, all from a dedicated online portal.
“Businesses are moving into cloud at a very fast rate these days. As their trusted end-to-end service provider, StarHub wants to enable our SMB customers to adopt cloud technology with ease, so they can take advantage of agile, business-friendly benefits such as cost-savings, accessibility and flexibility,” said Mr Kevin Lim, Chief Commercial Officer, StarHub.
SmartBusiness is launched at the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry 16th Annual SMEs Conference & 17th Infocomm Commerce Conference on 20-21 August 2014. As a launch promotion to support SMBs in growing their business, StarHub is offering eight free licences to Microsoft Office 365 and McAfee Endpoint Protection for three months to the first 100 customers that register a SmartBusiness account by entering the promotion code: SCCCILAUNCH, at www.starhub.com/smartbusiness. In addition, customers also enjoy a three-month website builder service and one-year domain name registration for free.
StarHub collaborates with IDA on iPACT
StarHub has joined IDA’s Partnership for Capability Transformation for the Infocomm Sector (iPACT) programme that aims to promote widespread technopreneurship by helping SMBs to leverage productisation and marketing strengths of large ICT companies as Singapore moves towards a Smart Nation. Under iPACT, StarHub is teaming up with innovative local SMBs and start-ups to co-develop new solutions or help these companies market their existing solutions. One such company is Deskera.
"Deskera offers an enterprise collaboration suite that helps businesses to easily organise data, reports, and documents without the trouble of managing any database an application servers. Our partnership with StarHub on SmartBusiness gives us instant visibility and access to local SMB customers, improving our time to market and competitiveness,” said Mr Saurabh Srivastava, Vice President of Enterprise Cloud at Deskera.
Assistant Chief Executive for the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore Mr Khoong Hock Yun said, “IDA is glad to see that our iPACT programme has been gaining industry traction since its launch in mid-June. Better, intuitive technology is a necessary step to assisting SMBs looking to utilise tech to modernise. We’re happy to see StarHub’s collaboration with IDA bearing fruit with their cloud marketplace, and hope both ICT SMBs and start-ups can help boost productivity for the rest of Singapore as we move towards becoming a Smart Nation.”
