TVS Electronics has a new CEO and an insider might get the top slot at BankAm.

UDAI UPENDRA  of Ranbaxy

K.S.RAMESH of TVS Electronics

DINESH PURI of Cambridge Tech.

NEW MAN IN: The Chennai-based printer and computer peripherals major, TVS Electronics, has a new CEO joining from Reckitt-Benckiser. K.S. Ramesh-an engineer-MBA combine-was Executive Director, Sales and Marketing (South Asia), at the household goods company. He replaces S.S. Rao.

MOVING UP: We had been keeping an eye on Bank of America, where the incumbent country manager, Arun Duggal, finishes his tenure. And we hear that BankAm's managing director of corporate banking, Vishwavir Ahuja, who joined in the early 80s fresh out of IIM-A, is most likely to bag the coveted corner room. Watch this space for news on Duggal's next assignment.

After the acquisition by Novell, Cambridge Technology Partners is revamping its India operations. For a start that means a new managing director in the form of Dinesh Puri. He joins from Citrix Systems where he was the managing director of its Indian subsidiary.

HIRE AND FIRE: Ranbaxy may have lost more than its fair share of senior executives in the recent past, but it has been pulling in replacements as well. And so in the place of long-time hr head Rajinder Sinh, Udai Upendra of Colgate-Palmolive moves in. Atul Malhotra has joined as Head (Global OTC) & Regional Director (Middle-East) after a 24-year stint with HLL, Sanjeev Dani comes in from Johnson & Johnson as Director (Pharma Marketing), and Lalit Ahluwalia is on board, too, as Director (Business Finance). That seems like a strong dose of fresh talent.

NET GENERATION
The New New Economy

Rule No.1: Don't call 'em dotcoms no more. Rule No.2: Go global (at least, try)

If you wanted to know just how pariah the word dotcom is, then all you had to do was sit through IBM Net Gen's 'Going Global' seminar late last month in Hong Kong. Not once was the six-letter word uttered by any of the 11 speakers at the day-and-a-half long seminar. Instead, the talks were full of words like ISV, IDC, ASP, net gen (IBM-speak for internet-based companies), and even biotechnology. Watching the 50-odd participants-most of whom were IBM Net Generation customers-have a go at the speakers, it was obvious that the search was very much on for the internet's holy grail: a business model that would actually deliver, first, revenues and finally, profits.

But just why was IBM playing host to dotcoms...er...internet and technology companies based out of places like Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo, and Singapore? Here's why: sometime around late 1999, the $88-billion-a-year Big Blue realised that it could not be the same company to small businesses operating in the e-space. Therefore, it decided to set up Net Gen (why three long years after the ill-fated boom started?) to cater specifically to such technology companies. The unfortunate part, however, is that Net Gen today (it grew 450 per cent in Asia Pacific last year) is staring down the internet precipice. The new division's survival, then, depends on helping its customers grow.

Ergo, all the speakers reinforced the need to grow beyond local boundaries. Timothy Wong, Net Gen's pointman for Asia Pacific, rustled up numbers to show that by 2003, 13 per cent of e-business customers will come from Asia-Pacific, compared to 9 per cent today. Lane Leskela, Director of research at Gartner (Asia-Pacific), talked about how collaborative commerce would become the dominant model for the next generation of b2b marketplaces. And David Ing, Global Business Strategist at Net Gen, spelt out his views on how internet companies could come up with a business strategy that changes dynamically in response to market conditions. His advice: understand customer value 1-to-1 and deploy capabilities, and effect mid-course corrections through real-time intelligence.

Tsutomu Maruyama, IBM's technology crystal-gazer (who came to the seminar wearing the world's smallest Linux wrist-watch machine) made five predictions:

• Technology will continue to become cheaper, faster, and better (he expected Moore's law to hold true for at least another 10 years)

• The entire planet will be inter-connected via small machines (a web server smaller than the head of a matchstick) 

• There will be ''power plants'' providing e-utilities (disparate e-services would get integrated in a power plant)

• There will be the rise of Next Web, where intermediaries will make a comeback (most of the value addition to information, he said, would be made by such intermediaries), and finally,

• Deep computing will become so powerful that it will manage all aspects of business, and managers will be free to focus on strategic issues.

And to those internet companies wondering where the next round of venture capital will go, the answer came loud and clear from the eight venture firms gathered at the seminar: life sciences, intelligent e-infrastructure, wireless applications, enabling technologies, and semi-conductor technology. Like Eric Solberg of Strategic Capital Group said, the biggest opportunity in Asia is in driving consolidation of existing entities. Not that there's much else the VCs can do about salvaging their investments.

-R. Sridharan

INTERVIEW
''We Arm Businesses With Tools To Scale Globally''

As the director of Net Gen business in Asia-Pacific, Timothy Wong heads one of the fastest growing markets for IBM. BT's R. Sridharan spoke to him on net companies going global. Excerpts:

Is Net Gen selling going global as a panacea to internet companies?

No, we don't see it as a panacea at all. Far from it, it is an important step in a company's development and one that must be taken very seriously. We only want to arm these businesses with the appropriate tools, techniques, and capabilities that they would need to scale globally.

Are certain categories of net companies better suited to going global?

Clearly there are some considerations. The quality of the management, the presence of a technology, processes, or business that is scalable globally, the ability to erect barriers outside your home market, and the strength of your funding are important considerations.

Shouldn't net companies 'glocalise' ahead of thinking global?

It depends on the market you operate in. In India we focused on the ISP business when we started off. But in Japan, for instance, we are more focused on mature segments like web hosting, value-added service, e-marketplace, and different B2B models.

Post dotcrash what kind of a mid-course correction is Net Gen planning?

Clearly, there is some weather out there at the moment, and people have their rain jackets on. Net Gen has not been affected to the extent you would expect because we were cautious about our B2C investments, and since we started only in January 2000, we were focusing on later-stage companies. Besides, Net Gen focuses on six other segments other than dotcoms.

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