India gets a desi office suite

Chennai-based CK Technologies, formerly called Chennai Kavigal, has launched Shakti Office 1.72 (SO 1.72) the latest version of its office suite. 

Priced at Rs 1,995 per license, this office suite has seven tools - SOwrite (word processor), SOcalc (spreadsheet), SOaccess (database), SOmail (email
client), SOdraw (paint program), SOshow (presentation program) and SOnet (HTML editor).

CK Technologies as part of bridging the digital divide had targeted its first version of Shakti Office at the rural market. Presently, SO 1.72
allows users to switch over to either Hindi or Tamil while using English.

Though at a later stage the company intends to incorporate all major Indian languages in Shakti Office suite.

The company has already bagged two orders for over 1,000 licenses from Bank of Baroda and Tamil Nadu police. Currently it is selling directly to
Government, PSUs, corporate, SMEs and educational institutions. In the nextcouple of months CK Technologies intends to partner with OEMs and SIs
to market the suite.

For this financial year, the company expects to install 8,000 units of software. It is targeting 30,000 installations for the year 2005-06 and
plans to touch the one lakh figure by 2006-07.

The company believes that governments and PSUs will be the early adopters of this technology, followed by Indian corporate who are embarrassed to
use pirated OS. CK Technologies, a part of the TeNeT Group, also expects n-Logue (part of TeNeT Group formed by IIT Madras focused on providing rural
Internet and connectivity) to deploy 20,000 alone for this financial year.

As per the demand of n-Logue, CK Technologies will be launching the Gujarati version of Shakti next month.

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Chennai