HUGHES LAUNCHES CLOUD SERVICES ON MICROSOFT PLATFORM

Hughes Communications India, Ltd. (HCIL), a leading provider of broadband satellite and managed network services, and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES) today announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to launch a subscription-based messaging and collaborative service built on Microsoft’s Communication Services platform for business customers.

As a completely integrated communications service, ‘Hughes Productivity Services,’ will offer end-to-end e-mailing solutions which promotes business messaging and collaboration. This service will eliminate users’ needs to invest in hardware, software licenses, security and related management costs by providing a ‘pay-per mailbox’ Service model and includes hosted versions of Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, and Office Communications Server. Customers will now have a cost-efficient enterprise class mailing solution without the hassle of infrastructure management and support and can rely on the service to deliver features such as active sync mobile devices integration, flexible mail box size, web calendaring facility, remote location archiving, and sender reputation filtering.

Costs savings for this deployment approach are 80-85% over a premise server installation. ‘Hughes Productivity Services’ will help customers migrate from an on-premise service, and this can be accomplished by individual users in less than 1 hour. It also enables seamless integration with a company’s internal Microsoft network that also allows management of utilizing current IT tools and the provider’s portal based management system.

The Microsoft Communication Services works on a pay- as- you- go and Zero Investment model, thus providing enterprises and SMBs with a rich enterprise–class applications hosting platform without any up-front costs along with significant productivity benefits.

Launching the service, Shivaji Chatterjee, VP, Enterprise Business, HCIL said, “The demand for software as a service model among Indian enterprises and SMBs has grown many fold over last few years. We are proud to be the frontrunners in offering the Microsoft based messaging and collaboration software in India as a hosted model. Hughes strength in verticals like Broking & Banking shall help leverage from this service. The existing base of 44,000+ VSATs in Shared Hub alone, can bring in a lot of traction. The Microsoft Hosted Exchange will provide more choice, flexibility and affordability to customers since they will not have to invest in buying license, installing and managing the software in-house. Hughes PAN India support coverage would increase customer satisfaction and uptime. We believe this will bring customer delight as both organizations are synergizing their core strength; product/ domain knowledge, satellite delivery, reach and uptime.

With this, we hope to expand our already strong existing client base across the country and we will continue to partner closely with Microsoft to bring a wider range of hosted applications to the Indian Market.”

Mr. Vikas Arora, Group Director, Enterprise Services Division, Microsoft India, talking about the partnership stated, “The cloud is making access to enterprise class technology easy for businesses across the board. We are delighted to be supporting Hughes in their efforts to democratize enterprise technologies – and making Microsoft’s popular messaging and collaboration tools accessible to a larger audience. “

The installed base of hosted email mailboxes in the APAC region, including both business and consumer accounts, is expected to grow from nearly 1.1 billion mailboxes in 2010, to over 1.5 billion mailboxes by 2014.

Growing penetration of Broadband Internet, both wired and wireless, continues to drive adoption of email services throughout the APAC region. Consumer growth is particularly strong in this region due to emerging markets, such as India, China and Southeast Asia. Business adoption of Hosted Business Email services in APAC still lags far behind North America and Europe, however is also showing signs of potential growth, as more SMBs in the region become comfortable with conducting business over the Internet.

The key features of Microsoft Communication Services include fast, reliable and secure infrastructure consisting of redundant network connections, Premium anti spam and anti-virus, anywhere access, collaboration features like Group calendaring and scheduling, public e-mail folders, shared contacts, calendars and folders, message recovery and retention, Data back up and Archiving.

About Hughes Communications India Limited (HCIL)

Hughes Communications India Limited is India’s leading provider of broadband satellite networks and services for enterprises, governments and small businesses. HughesNet^® encompasses all broadband solutions and managed services from Hughes, bridging the best of satellite and terrestrial technologies. Hughes pioneered and is the leading provider of value-added services and applications such as interactive distance learning and rural networks, bringing the benefits of broadband to underserved markets. Hughes broadband satellite products are based on global standards approved by the TIA, ETSI and ITU standards organizations, including IPoS/DVB-S2, RSM-A and GMR-1. HCIL is a majority owned subsidiary of Hughes Network Systems, LLC. To date, Hughes has shipped more than 2.2 million systems to customers in over 100 countries.

Headquartered outside Washington, D.C., in Germantown, Maryland, USA, Hughes maintains sales and support offices worldwide. Hughes is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hughes Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: HUGH). For additional information, please visit www.hughes.in and www.hughes.com.