|
|
            
|
SOFTWARE Taxing Times Karnataka's decision to tax software has the industry crying foul It never rains but it pours. Just when India's software biggies in Bangalore were devising ways to battle the tech slowdown in the US, the Karnataka government has slammed them with a 4 per cent tax on software and services, including programming and lease of computer software. The move will not impact export earnings of Bangalore-based majors such as Infosys and Wipro-or that of the industry-but it will certainly affect their domestic earnings. Small companies which do projects will be the hardest hit, as margins are likely to get squeezed.
Vendors of packaged software for accounting, ERP, and anti-virus will be hard hit due to the tax. Companies outsourcing projects will also have to bear the burden, since the tax is payable by those who lease out software. More than the tax itself, what's worrying vendors is the impact on demand. ''As such brick-n-mortar companies are reluctant to pay up for software, and making them expensive would further dampen the demand,'' fears Anant Koppar, CEO, Kshema Technologies. In addition to software and services, internet kiosks and e-commerce have been brought under the professional tax net. Will the move affect Bangalore's pole position in the industry? Yes, say some. Currently, some 15 offices of software companies are opened in Bangalore every month. But now the state's Chief Minister, S.M. Krishna may be hard-pressed to lure investors. Agrees L. Ranganathan of Cerebra Integrated Technologies: ''It's a wrong signal to send out to investors.'' NASSCOM's master lobbyist, Mehta, is probably already working the Bangalore-Delhi sector. -Venkatesha Babu E-SECURITY Ernst & Young's new lab in Pune hacks into hundreds of websites-for a cause. Clean shaven, close-cropped, and sporting a tie on a buttoned-down shirt, Anand Dighe (not his real name) is nobody's idea of a hacker. Neither is the clinical, dust-proof room where he spends 12 hours a day trying to break into websites, in any way redolent of the dim-lit, cavernous den that FBI's Most Wanted hacker Kevin Mitnick (handle: Condor) may have preferred. If there are differences, it's for good reason. Dighe is one of the seven computer whiz who make up consultant Ernst & Young's six-month old e-security lab in Pune. Not only is it E&Y's only such centre in India, but also the first of its kind in the whole of Asia. And Dighe is what you would call an ethical hacker: somebody who's paid to find breaches in the infotech network of companies. Says Sunil Chandiramani, Director, E&Y: ''The objective is to ensure that the client's network is secure and robust.'' In the six months that the lab has been around, it has signed up six clients, although Chandiramani would not reveal their names. With more companies moving their offline transactions online, e-security is going to be a big issue. In the US, for instance, nearly $378 million in losses were caused by hackers in calendar 2000. While no such reliable figures are available of India, a recent kpmg fraud survey found that 17 per cent of the companies surveyed had experienced some kind of security breach, including system crash, web site defacement, and virus attacks. Although hacking sounds like fun, it isn't. Breaking into a network can take days, weeks, or even months. To gain access to a server, the hacker must gather as much information about it as possible. The first step is to get the IP (Internet Protocol) address, which is a 12-digit string. Then, the hacker has to find out what operating system the server runs on (Windows NT/Unix), and the version number of the various applications the machine may be running. Based on that information, the virtual intruder selects his hacking tool, which is a specialised program such as Novell 3.x and 4.x, L0phtCrack (which cracks passwords), and Keylogger, which captures keystrokes that are entered in the target system. Each of these programs is specific to a particular software system, and try to exploit certain programming flaws within the software. Once the hacker has broken into a system he can do what he wants: post a funny message on the home page or transfer a couple of millions out into his own account. At the E&Y lab, of course, ethical hacking is done with the client's permission, and the employee is screened in detail before being assigned a hacking job. If only all hackers were so well-mannered. -Roop Karnani TOURISM ...Not yet, but that's where the ambitious metropolis wants to get a few years on. What's your dream?'' ask half-page advertisements in Mumbai's broadsheets. And the unlikely advertiser is the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC), which wants to turn Mumbai into a tourist hub for South and Sout-East Asia. As a first step, it is working on a Great Mumbai Bazaar concept, fashioned after the famous Dubai Shopping Festival. Joking or serious? Serious, says Ashish Kumar Singh, Managing Director of MTDC. ''May be not tomorrow, but five years down the line, we will be there,'' he claims. But will the overcrowded metropolis be able to match the glamour of the Middle-East? The Dubai airport attracts 80 airlines, and is just five hours by air from a host of countries, including India, the CIS countries, South East Asia, and many European countries. Besides, Dubai has an exceptional partnership with the local government, and has managed to keep the city's biggest attraction-duty free shopping-alive ever since it launched in March, 1996. ''In 1998,'' points out Nitin Puri, coo, Bates Pangulf, which has been handling the Dubai Shopping Festival pitch since inception, ''the festival gave away 117 Lexus cars, and 31 kilos of gold, among other things.'' Mumbai does not intend to ape the Dubai model blindly, though. ''What will an ordinary man do by winning a Mercedes?'' asks Singh. Ergo, the city plans to give away value deals that can be easily encashed. While the details are being worked out, what has already been conceived is that 300 kilos of gold will be for the take in May. There will be 25,000 raffle tickets on sale, each priced at Rs 500 and two people will win five kilos each every day. Besides, MTDC will get the state government to offer sales tax breaks during the festival. ''This is not a tent-and-maidan affair,'' says a Senior Vice-President at Bates India. ''All shops in the city will be on sale and we will get the authorities to allow stores to be open until well past midnight, and restaurants to serve food until wee hours of morning,'' he says. Mumbai may not have Dubai's money power-an estimated $15 million is spent for every incremental sale of $1.3 billion-but it has a unique smorgasbord of culture to offer the visiting tourist. Neither is May the best of times in Mumbai. For one, it is cruelly humid. For another, May is also the time when retail goes into a slump. But people like Singh say that those are precisely the reasons why an international bazaar should be held in May. Meanwhile, MTDC is busy convincing retailers, airlines, hotels and tour operators to offer discounts so that international visitors-40 per cent of whom land in Mumbai-are retained in the city. After the local teaser ads, Bates is now working on delivering a national campaign, where singer Hariharan along with Leslie Lewis will belt out a jingle penned by Gulzar. mtdc's grand plans may or may not work. But you can't blame it for not trying. -Shamni Pande OFF-BEAT A not-so-fictitious account of a day in the life of a call centre operator.
1645 hours, Friday: The bus is on time. Indian driver; American efficiency. We pick up more people as we head towards the office. Two of my friends, Ritu and Sangeeta, board the bus. We make small talk. Maybe friends is too strong a word. The high attrition rate will ensure that we never become more than good acquaintances. 1825 hours, Friday: There's just enough time to catch a quick cup of coffee at the canteen before rushing to my station. Most of the others are already in. I work in the retail finance cell. My job is to call customers in the US who've slipped making credit card payments. I make between 350 and 400 calls a day. 1955 hours, Friday: It's my 21st call of the day. For the purpose of this call, I'm Jennifer, one of the three names I use with customers. The woman at the other end of the line is in a hurry. It's early morning in the US and she's probably rushing to work. She's also irritable-calls me a leech. I'd like to respond in kind but am sure someone is monitoring my calls. That's routine procedure. I somehow extract the promise of a payment from her. That should help my incentive-tally; we're rewarded on the basis of the money and the promises we pry out. But the pay sucks, a measly Rs 6,500 a month. 2130 hours, Friday: A late dinner and my first meal of the day. The food isn't bad, and it's free. I sit next to Sangeeta at dinner and listen distractedly to her prattling on about her boyfriend. She's just been here a month; there's still life in her. I used to have a boyfriend once too, but he couldn't handle my job. Even my dad can't. 0030 hours, Saturday: There's a mail from my supervisor about a training programme being organised tomorrow. It'll probably be a refresher course in accent-training. Initially it was fun, learning to sound like an American. Now, it's wearing thin. Or it could be a course in some new privacy laws some state in the US has passed... 0335 hours, Saturday: The guard walks me from the bus to my door. I'm tired. Somehow, this wan't what I had in mind when I joined this company. Then, I was fresh out of engineering college and thought a year's experience in a transnational would look good on my resume. Now I don't... -Vinod Mahanta COLOURED
WATER The latest round of the cola wars sees Coke and Pepsi stop advertising to attract the customer's attention and start doing so to prove a point. They don't want to change the world. They just want to sell coloured water. These two companies just want to make lot of noise. The marketing head of one, Coke, Shripad Nadkarni broke the unwritten rule about never calling Pepsi by name but just referring to it as ''the competition'', when he released, for popular consumption, a statement that said: ''Pepsi is the world's number two cola brand and we are obliged to show them their rightful place.'' Good quote, Shripad. The marketing head of the other, Vibha Paul Rishi, alleges the competition has ''disparaged'', her company's trademark logo, a globe, and punchline, Yeh Dil Maange More. The new Pepsi ad, that shows Cyrus Broacha in drag sipping from a bottle that says ''Grow Up'' in much the same way the Thums Up logo is rendered, she says is ''just wit'', not disparagement. Thanks for drawing a line, Vibha. The rest of the still-developing fracas-PepsiCo has said it may just write to Coke's Atlanta HQ asking the company to behave itself -has elements like taste tests (two of them actually), claims and counter-claims and ads, and counter ads. Coke's leveraged the advantage of possessing more soft-drink brands than PepsiCo to the hilt: Thums Up and Sprite have taken potshots at Pepsi. And the company's refused to withdraw its Thums Up ad that uses a punchline that was, inarguably, made famous by Pepsi. ''Yeh Dil Maange More is part of everyday lingo now,'' defends Nadkarni. ''It even appears in newspaper headlines. It's alright if we use it.'' There's little by way of advertising regulation to stop this sniping; the Advertising Standards Council of India's code is self-regulatory. So, it's up to the two companies to grow up. Maybe the realisation that they've stopped advertising to grab the customer's attention, and are doing so merely to score a point over the opposition may strike a chord with these rational marketers. Now that, we'd like to see more of... -Seema Shukla ENTERPRISE A clutch of 24x7 mobile auto service providers have mushroomed in India's Carville. If you own a Mercedes, then this will not come as news to you. But if it's a more modest car that inhabits your garage, read on. The burgeoning population of cars in the capital-there is an estimated 800,000 of them, plying on 13,500 kms of roadway-is proving to be the catalyst for a new business that promises to make your ride round the town more comfortable. Picture this: it's dead of the night, you are headed home back from a party, and your old faithful cops it. Don't blow a vein; just call up Auto Club Asia at 011-4323405, and within minutes-or so the company claims-a service van will reach you. If the problem is minor, you'd be back on the road in no time. But if it's an axle that's broke, the car will get towed to a workshop. The good news? You still get dropped home by the service company. Patel Auto has been providing such a service for its premium Mercedes customers. But now hoi polloi gets to hop into the new breed of auto care companies that won't just fix their cars, but also help them with insurance, registration, finance, repairs, and maintenance. There's serious money and some big names going into the new business. Auto Club Asia, for example, has been angel-funded by Stanchart CEO Rana Talwar, and Jerry Rao (former CEO of Citibank India) is the technology solutions provider. ''We want to be an end-to-end one-stop auto service provider,'' says Anuj Patnaik, Managing Director of Auto Club Asia. Others like Bitek, Crossroads, Race, and Delhi Helpline have their own fleet of service vehicles, replete with wireless radio and basic equipment to handle a minor fault, located around the city waiting for a call. The icing for car owners is that services like route guidance, repairs for minor breakdown, and delivery of emergency petrol all come free with the annual membership fee of Rs 500. But the revenues for most of these companies are still nothing more than a trickle. With an investment of Rs 1.2 crore (Rs 30 lakh of which was spent buying 12 vehicles), Race is looking at returns only after 24 months. Having touched 11,000 members (''10 of them after Merc-owners,'' beams MD Amit Jain), the only source of revenue is the annual membership fee of Rs 365. Given that 70,000 cars are put on the Delhi roads each year, it should only be a matter of time before business moves into top gear. -Ashutosh Sinha
|
|
Issue Contents Write to us Subscription Syndication INDIA TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY |
TEENS TODAY
© Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
Worse, the industry fears that the example
set by the it capital of India could be emulated by other states. Says
Dewang Mehta, President of the National Association of Software and
Services Companies (NASSCOM): ''It is surprising how a progressive state
like Karnataka could resort to this. It is not the percentage of sales tax
that concerns me, rather the timing of it, given the fact that the sector
is passing through a rough phase.''
1600 hours, Friday: A year ago if
someone had told me I would be brushing my teeth at four in the afternoon,
I would have laughed. Now here I am doing exactly that in as listless a
manner as possible. I work the late evening shift at the call centre
operation of a transnational. Work begins at 6.30 p.m and ends at 2.30
a.m. Life? Don't ask.