Microsoft’s sleeper hit, Kaizala, powers over 1000 organizations in India already

Abhishek Baxi

Microsoft Kaizala

Microsoft has announced that Kaizala is now powering over 1000 organizations in India across government and business institutions.

Business organizations using this product represent a cross-section of industry sectors, from BFSI to manufacturing to retail, and include YES Bank, UPL, Alembic, Shopper’s Stop, and Eureka Forbes.

A ‘made for India’ product, Kaizala aims to enhance workplace productivity by bringing mobile-only workers, mainly first-line workers, into a digitally integrated modern workplace. It is, of course, backed by Microsoft Azure platform ensuring compliance with an organization’s data-use policies as well as GDPR.

Kaizala, a Microsoft Garage project introduced in 2016, was formally launched as a beta in February 2017 by Satya Nadella at the Future Decoded event in Mumbai. Later in the year, the company officially debuted the new product – Microsoft Kaizala.

At the launch, Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India said that the company is delighted with the rapid adoption in just over an year. “Microsoft Kaizala, with cloud scale & enterprise security, is enabling organizations to achieve more by empowering employees, engaging customers, and enhancing workplace productivity,” he said.

Microsoft Kaizala is now available in 18 languages including Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, and Telugu.

Microsoft also announced new, unique features like Me Chat and Persistent Chat for Kaizala. With Persistent Chat, messages are saved over time, hence, even when a user joins a group at a later stage he/she will be able to read messages that were exchanged prior to his/her joining the group. Me Chat is a user’s personal space where the user can save notes, messages, photos, and more. Users can find their saved items quickly with Search, and can forward them to whoever they want.

The company also announced Microsoft Kaizala Web in preview giving users the ability to use Microsoft Kaizala on their web browser. Also, users can now make audio and video calls to their Microsoft Kaizala contacts.

Microsoft Kaizala is a chat-based communication and data management tool. It is an enterprise ready, compliant and secure chat app. It offers organizations easy and simple way to share data for insightful decision making and gives employees an easy-to-use solution for efficient collaboration and improved productivity. Microsoft Kaizala provides controlled user access and data security in accordance with an organization’s policies and is compliant with data protection legislations such as GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC2 and HIPAA.

– Rajiv Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft

Microsoft Kaizala is an open platform and has developers integrating their solutions to address diverse business needs. Microsoft Partners like WittyParrot, Bitscape, PC Solutions, et al offer custom solutions for businesses.

Microsoft Kaizala is now commercially available across 28 markets in Asia, Middle East, Africa, and South America. Microsoft also announced that it will be expanding the reach of Kaizala to Office 365 commercial plans worldwide.