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STATS & STRATS What's Hot! Some respite for strapped veecees as the FM eases exit norms. Meet the new Controller of Certifiying Authorities. Debate Napster. Dissect the mood in Mumbai. By Aparna Ramalingam, Praveen S. Thampi, & Roshni Jayakar
e-lead K.N. Gupta's hurdles are more than virtual. As India's first controller of certifying authorities for digital signatures, he faces the uphill task of giving Indian e-commerce some sort of a legal shape. Gupta says he will start receiving applications for Certifying Authorities by the end of December, 2000, or early January, 2001. Initially, the license will be for a fixed period-perhaps one or even two years-with a maximum license fee of Rs 25,000. The race has begun. If Gupta has his way, the first among equals would be the Reserve Bank of India and the Postal Department. But he insists there is no bar on the private sector entering the Certifying Authorities game. Says Gupta: ''Even software houses like TCS plus some ISPs have shown interest.'' However, for a nervous private sector, the proof of the pudding will be in the certification. e-news Some good news after quite a while. But, this is for the money-lenders. The Union Finance Ministry has eased the exit norms for venture capital funds. The government had earlier slapped two exit clauses on VC funds stipulating that they could not exit within one year of investing in an unlisted company; and that they must exit within one year of an IPO. Both these clauses have been now revoked. Broadband plans are getting broader. Bharti Enterprises and Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) are to jointly invest $650 million to set up ''India's first and the world's largest-capacity'' submarine cable venture. Sify too jumps onto the broadboat. As per a four-year contract, with effect from January, 2001, the Netherlands-based connectivity provider New Skies will offer 60 megabits of satellite-based internet services to Sify, which, in turn, will resell it. The cost: a cool $600,000 per month. Wipro's ISP netKracker embraces zdNet India as its exclusive it content provider, while cell-major Hutchison clicks on Indiatimes for WAP. Cyber India Online (CIOL) joins hands with neoIT for global infotech community expertise. Elsewhere, the Hinduja Finance-promoted IndusInd Entertainment has acquired the US-based portal forindia.com to beef up its Net-on-cable strategy. Finally, KLG Systel-promoted Jaldi.com, an on-line shopping and finance portal, has merged with Windows2Shop.com, a consumer durables portal. e-napster Beyond the music-piracy debate, what the Napster fiasco throws up is the internet's original role-and strength-as an absolute peer-2-peer medium. That's the reason why e-commerce still limps after five-plus years of orgiastic projections while an 18-month-old music site, powered by a file-sharing app, spawns a following of 38 million users. Sad then that the Bertelsmann-Napster deal leads us to believe that it's just another copyright violation issue. No way: technology can quickly overtake profits. Check out those numerous server-free p2p apps like Gnutella. And, with a broadband boom round the corner, full albums or huge encyclopaedias could be mailed as single attachments. What's the remedy then? A worldwide firewall (WWF)? By Net time, the first call might as well be the final one. Wake up. e-mood Let the dotcoms doom or bloom, hyperlinked jargons are here to stay. The MWUTs (most widely used terms) of the new-e-ergo B2B and B2C-just got updated. They're now Back-2-Bank, and Back-2-Consultancy, respectively. A number of investment bankers and consultants who had taken the plunge are now returning. The latest rumoured to do so is Padma Chandrasekaran, content chief at Sify.com. The back-end news is that the VCs don't buy that logic about ads-get-us-money anymore. Portals like easybuymusic-an offline-online music offering model that has nothing to do with advertising-have got angel funding, while auction site Bazee.com is revamping its revenue model after being beaten out of shape by bidorbuy.com. Worse, VCs who had been liberal in funding dotcoms entrepreneurs are also finding the going tough. Will Chrysalis Capital, having funded 10 companies so far, pass the test when it raises its next tranche of venture funding this month or next? REDIFF+THINKINDIA
Says thinkindia.com's Gopal Krishna: ''We have a very close product-fit, the local orientation-which Rediff has-and a team in place. Now, Rediff will be able to monetise its page-views.'' Indeed, it seems the intangibles-the absence of legacy, an experienced management team, and an all-stock deal (no cash outflow)-have tipped the balance in thinkindia's favour. As did thinkindia's low cash-burn, which is in keeping with Rediff's conservatism. In any case, established players like eindia.com and chaitime.com have been valued at over $100 million (albeit some time ago). Rediff mopped up $65 million on the NASDAQ. ''It makes a lot of sense for Rediff to acquire a site in that space,'' say Jayesh Vaidya, Managing Director, chai time.com. It does indeed. Thanks to its singular focus on the homegrown market, Rediff has been acutely aware of the site's rapidly-eroding NRI base. From 90 per cent in 1996, NRIs currently account for around a quarter of its 158 million pageviews per month. Says Balakrishnan: ''We have some 25 million page-views in US and some half-a-million unique users, but have not been deriving any revenues. '' Rediff's earlier plan to build a team in the US sank without a trace. That was in 1997. Its second coming has been worth the wait. -Pooja Garg Be it Mumbai or Delhi or Chennai... the story of net-via-cable is pretty much the same: a tiny customer base. Six months after the Rajan Raheja-controlled Hathway Cable and Datacom (Hathway) made internet-via-cable a reality in Chennai, it has 400 subscribers. Hathway puts on a brave face. Says its vice-president E.V.S. Chakravarthy: ''Service is equally important. The customer relations management is being tightened up.'' Well, what is working according to plan is the unusual peace agreement hammered out with Kalanithi Maran, the supremo of the Sun TV-owned Sumangli Cable, which dominates the market. While territorial rights have been maintained on an 'as-is-where-is' basis, the name of Hathway-in which Star TV has a 26 per cent-will be subordinated to that of Sun, which also reserves the right to develop new areas in Chennai. So, the transition to internet services has been smooth. Hathway will offer net-via-cable to Sun on a pilot basis, for which the revenue-sharing details are being worked out. While it has been argued that Hathway's interests (read: its brand) have been the casualty, that hasn't stopped the cable major from extending the model. Hathway is close to arriving at a similar understanding with another cable operator, Cable Vision, in Vishakapatnam. If all works out, the agreement will give Hathway control over 60 per cent of the city. Hathway will also launch internet-through-cable in Hyderabad and Bangalore simultaneously in a few weeks' time. Here, Hathway is fighting hard to get marketshare from Siticable. Says Chakravarthy: ''But if we offer value-added quality services, there is a good reason why cable operators would prefer to associate with us.'' In both Hyderabad and Vishakapatnam networks had to be laid from scratch-an advantage for Hathway, in terms of lower upgradation offtake. Starting Q1 2001, Hathway will also set up Experience Centres in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore for consumers to come face-to-face with interactive TVs. ''We are repositioning ourselves as a broadband service provider,'' Chakravarthy says. All's well as long as the silent agreement with Sun TV stays in place. Of course, consumers will have to bite too. -Nitya Varadarajan If you are computing, you need storage. If you are storing, you need a back-up, ergo storage. Then again, if you have stored data and a back-up, you still need to have a disaster recovery system for which you need... Storage is hot. Though on a smaller base, the desi storage market is growing twice as fast than the global one. In the first nine months of 2000, Compaq shipped over 150 terabytes (1,50,000 GB) of storage space against 90 terabytes in 1999. Says Pallab Talukdar, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group, Compaq: ''The size of the market has grown 100 per cent in the last nine months.'' There has also been a corresponding hike in storage capacities. Seagate, for example, has recently launched a 180-gb drive in India aimed at the data warehousing market. Says Michael Green, Manager (Enterprise Product Marketing), Seagate Technology: ''I think the current sweet spot for the storage drive is 18 GB.'' The scorching pace is easily explained: traditional firms it-enabling their systems. Then comes the backup needs. Back-up capacity is, typically, seven times that of the storage capacity of the enterprise. Another driver is the growth of the storage area network (san), which is independent of the enterprise servers. Says George Eby Mathew, Head (Research), itspace.com: ''Close to 40 per cent of Indian companies are looking for san and network-attached storage.'' Now, what do you think of that good-old paperless lure that the first IBM machines threw up? -Ashutosh Sinha |
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They're calling it a beta acquisition.
While it's no secret that a cash-rich Rediff.com has been searching for a
US dotcom for some time now, the pure-play portal's final choice-thinkindia.com,
an NRI-specific portal in beta mode-was intriguing. Of course, from
Rediff's point of view, that could be a synonym for consistent strategy.
Promoted by Gopal Krishna, CEO, Sandy Rekhi, CTO, and Gaurav Dalmia,
Co-Founder and President (with investments from Arjun Malhotra-one of
HCL's co-founders-and Subhash Arora, another ex-HCL person),
thinkindia.com is a pure-play portal, much like its acquirer.