For every technology, major in the country, Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) represent the holy grail of opportunity. With around 40 million SMEs in the country, for Microsoft it is no different. For years, through its ambitious 'partner network' Microsoft has been trying to reach out to this audience and it has now received a shot in the arm.The Goods and Services Tax GST ) has forced and hastened technology adoption among SMEs. In a conversation with Economictimes.com, Amit Kumar, the General Manager, Small and Mid-Market Solutions and Partners at Microsoft India says the, "opportunity is huge". Edited excerpts.There is a huge focus on the entrepreneurial energy in the small and medium businesses. I think the biggest driver for me is the digital transformation. Today, businesses are thinking of how they can use technology to reach out to more customers, to connect and enable customers or to get their team or employees to respond better to customers. They are also looking at how they can reduce the cost of their operations, which means the products that people were selling are becoming different. I think the mindset of people who run businesses is changing - is becoming digital. That is what we see happening across the country.What we are trying to do over the last one year or so is getting into a mindset where we do not apply the analog thinking we used to earlier to what we do now. And if you just look at our business, there will be two dimensions - partners and marketing. We are trying to have a different and a new approach in reaching out to customers digitally. The effectiveness and the efficacy of the marketing engine on digital has increased rapidly. And our best partners are making an effort in changing the language into a business language which lends a whole lot of different context to what you are trying to solve. Of course, then comes the cloud solution and things like a cloud solution provider licensing type, a monthly billing option. Those obviously are the enablers.The first big focus for us is obviously Office 365. A lot of companies in India still do not have proper, productive, secure email solutions and there is a huge wide space for that. The second focus for us is the cloud solutions that we offer. A lot of our partners are trying to figure out how to use this technology, how to run campaigns to some of the new age companies.You do not sell to them, rather you get them to come to you. Then there are events like GST for example, where people want to buy a PC that can help them clear their doubts. So we tied up with HP and KPMG to provide such a solution. Our effort is to create sale through partners so that these partners can then reach the customers. Today, ​ 9000 partners across 250 cities reach 160,000 SMB customers for us.I think the scope and the scale of what we are doing with the cloud is huge in the country. In the old world you could just sell software to a lot of companies and then let them use it. But if I sell you Microsoft Azure, one you will need some kind of engagement from me and second for me the opportunity to get you to consume is even more. So the type of sales motions that we will require will be different, the kind of engagement programs you will have with the customer is different. It is not about selling to the customer and vanishing once the sale is complete. In the old world you could do that, but today the first sale is only the start of the relationship. It means nothing till the time I am able to get you to start using that product to your satisfaction. And it is not even deployment. Earlier it was just an implementation thing.Today, again that is just the starting point. So if you bought 25 seats of Office 365, getting to use email is not the end of the journey. It used to be when we were selling Exchange, but today we have to sit down with the customer and think about him, or a partner needs to sit down and think, "Okay these 25 seats of email is fine but what else?" What else can I provide a customer? Can it be, perhaps something like Skype Today, we need to have that constant dialogue with our partners so that they in turn can simplify the language to the customer and keep solving problems all the time and that is how the cloud business grows.I think the use of technology will only increase. There will be a huge need for customers to upgrade and update systems and get the latest in many technologies, including the Microsoft technologies. Customers will start thinking about more and more about things like disaster recovery and security as they go online and that only means increasing opportunity for us to serve them. I think it is a huge opportunity. It is a once in a lifetime event that will happen in India and as Indian businesses move towards becoming GST compliant and they start getting the benefits of being part of the GST network, I think that there will be a huge opportunity for us.We are internally getting up our systems in place and have put our billing systems and tax compliance systems updated. That's our side when we act as a company, but then as a market opportunity our first focus or you can say our deepest involvement is in the place where we are talking with either the GSPs or anyone who is actually using a Microsoft solution to file taxes, to keep books or to keep inventory. We are enabling our partners to work with them in this dynamic world. Our aim is to train, to enable, to do sessions about what taxation means, how to a file a return, how to connect.The second way we are looking at GST is working with existing customers. There are questions that they have, there are times we work with them to understand the implication GST will have on their business. We try to figure out how the transition will happen and there are lots of customers looking for solutions like, "can I buy disaster recovery solution along with this, how I will have backup of my taxation data that we file, is there a way to upgrade and many of the daily scenarios revolving around this.For a large enterprise this is different, but in the trader community it is different. So the merchant association will have a different set of questions, the CA association will have a different set of questions.The third aspect for us is partnering with companies like HP and KPMG to launch the GST solution that can help simplify filing of taxes under the GST. This can help us reach out to a completely new set of customers.We are working with a few more partners and inking some more relationships where people are going to be using Azure as their backhand platform and then they could sell their applications to customers. It could be an application to file taxes, it could be keeping books and aspects like that.There is a lot going on and several partnerships yet to be announced, yet to be formed. Many of them are in stages where they are already in the market. People are trying and experimenting and selling. That is the landscape of what we are doing with GST and is vastly different and exciting.