4 ways Microsoft is reinventing productivity in APAC

Microsoft says the Asia Pacific region is fast-changing and 'helping people get things done' in a mobile-first, cloud-first world is core to its purpose in this region.

In his keynote address at the Microsoft Analyst Summit Asia 2015 in Singapore, Cesar Cernuda, Microsoft president Asia Pacific, said he is confident Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help individuals and businesses become more productive.

"A big part of our strategy is not just to be a global company but to have local presence.

"We have operations in almost every country in Asia – with local teams, teams led by local leaders in each of our markets. That really helps us to execute our global strategy in a local way," he says.

The Microsoft New Zealand team supports this country as well as American Samoa, Samoa and Vanuatu, and has offices in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

At present, Paul Muckleston is the managing director for Microsoft New Zealand.

As part of his keynote, Cernuda outlined four key areas Microsoft will be focusing on in order to develop technology that can help people achieve more: mobile, social, intelligent and natural.

Mobile is essentially about creating a mobile world that revolves around a user, so they can utilise any device in any location to access content.

Social is about developing tools that empower social productivity and create opportunities for real-time collaboration and collective creation with people in different locations.

Cernuda used Office 365 and Yammer as examples of social productivity tools.

Intelligent tools understand the context in order to anticipate and prioritise, for instance how Windows 10 will work on the Windows phone, says Cernuda.

Natural refers to tools which no longer require a user to learn how they work, and instead learn to work the way a user does.

Cernuda says this will create new ways to interact using touch, voice and gesture, similar to how Kinect uses different ways to interact and control with gaming, and the Skype Translator offers speech translation from one language to another during communication.

These four dimensions of focus represent Microsoft's commitment to change its ideas about productivity and create an environment where users can be more efficient with their time, Cernuda says.

He says this is an exciting time for the region. APAC is currently home to 1.27 billion internet users, more than the combined number from the Americas and Europe, and has the largest regional eCommerce market.

On top of this, it houses the headquarters for about 34% of the world's top 2,000 companies.

Microsoft, with more than 26,000 employees across 18 subsidiaries, is poised to play a part in the rapid growth of the region, says Cernuda.