Anand Sudarshan Co-CEO, Planetasia, chats with BT's Aparna Ramalingam

Q. To begin with, is yours a web-designing company or an e-enabling one?

A. We moved from the pure design scene two years ago. Today, we are an internet technology services company building applications for suppliers and customers of our clients.

What happened to all those interactive units set up by advertising agencies?

Yes, there were consulting companies, tech companies, ad agencies etc. But, the game is a little different than originally envisaged. Technology is the prime driver in today's market.

What's your offshore on-site mix?

We are converting our business more and more into offshore. Currently offshore constitutes about 60 percent of the mix and in the future we are looking at increasing it to 80 per cent. We have one centre in Bangalore, and not looking at other centres.

But in view of the US tech slow down...

Any person who is saying that he is not affected by the tech slowdown is being brave. We are looking at healthier dotcoms now like click-and-mortar companies. Eighty-five per cent of our business comes from these companies.

Your operational strategy in a nutshell...

We follow the four D's-define, design, develop, and deploy. This has two elements basically: the technology, and the interface or what we call user experience. In the latter, we take the brand character or brand standards into account and convert it into prototypes for clients. After this we integrate it with the technology. It is important to maintain the customer experience as you are targeting the client's customers ultimately.

What is your companies revenue mix?

10-15 per cent of the cost of a project is utilised in creating a user experience and 85 per cent is technology. Our revenues are a little over $15 million.

Some say your domain is the sweetest segment in the Internet pie...

In the case of ISPs, one will see a consolidation because there's an infrastructure issue involved. But ours is largely a human services business. There is essentially a creative force here.

Beam Me Back, BT!

Travelling back @net time, to April-May, 1996

• In a pioneering effort to classify and rate WWW-content, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat start Alexa Internet. The aim: to ''tap into this collective reserve of information, knowledge, and experience, and transform it into a free navigation service that benefits everyone.''

• May starts with the 5th WWW Conference taking place in Paris. The gathering is soon followed by the official W3Consortium releasing HTML version 3.2. And yes, the first ideas related to XML are also being tossed around.

• Heat picks on the browsing front as both Microsoft and Netscape roll out the 3.0 versions of their browsers. So far, it's Netscape all the way.

• Sun Microsystems announces SunSoft Internet Workshop, the Netra Internet Server family, the Joe development environment, and Internet Practice. The Netra Internet Sever, based on the UltraSPARC platform, can handle approximately 15-18 million hits per day (the maximum at that time).

• To compete with the services provided by foreign banks, Reserve Bank of India introduces the Electronic fund Transfer Facility (ETF) facility for customers of Indian banks. Initially, the facility is to be available between Madras (Chennai) and Mumbai. The service is to be extended to Delhi and Calcutta later on.

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