Technology is common to all. You can buy the same servers, the same routers, and the same software that any of your competitors do. What's uncommon, though, is the innovativeness that goes into its application. And the innovativeness comes from having both a vision for technology and the skills to execute on it. For the last two years, Business Today has been publishing an annual compilation of the best technology users in India. In this, our third listing, you'll find innovative IT users from across a wide range of sectors. There's a telecom giant that is building India's biggest broadband network, a financial services company that is using IT to tap small towns, an eye hospital that is delivering world-class care wirelessly, and an IT services company that is farming out its own backoffice work to a rural BPO. Out-of-the-box thinking? You bet.

ARAVIND EYE CARE
Tech With Vision
Where eye care is online.

Clear vision: A brilliant example of tech for the poor

Aravind eye care system has taken low-cost, but hi-tech eye care out of its five hospitals and into Tamil Nadu's villages where thousands of people run the risk of going blind from diabetes. How? Aravind has state-of-the-art mobile vision centres that allow technicians to screen patients and zap the images to doctors at the other end of the computer. They can then decide if a trip to the hospital is required. Says R. Kim, head of the telemedicine set-up: "Given the advances in technology, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to address patients not just across the state, but across the country." Why not indeed?

-Rahul Sachitanand

BALCO's Baid: Ringing the change

BALCO
Convergence Co.
Metal basher, but IT-savvy.

Eight months ago, when plain old telephony seemed incapable of taking the heat emanating from its shop floor, BALCO didn't yank off the copper wires and go back to asking its workers to yell across to each other. Instead, it brought in state-of-the-art IP telephony system. That's just one of the changes the erstwhile PSU's new owners, Anil Agarwal's Vedanta Resources, have ushered in as part of their it mission, tellingly named "Sarva Sampurna" (it means self-reliant). From the next fiscal, balco's Korba plant in the back-of-beyond of Chhattisgarh will install Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, which will enable the company to track all moving objects within its premises and make its materials handling system completely automated. The company has invested Rs 2.7 crore in building this infrastructure, but plans to spend another Rs 13 crore on beefing it up. It has roped in Pricewaterhouse-Coopers (PWC) to make its journey towards communication convergence a smoother one, putting in place an advanced sap backbone, corporate finance management, and treasury management. Once in place, it will allow BALCO to start hedging on the London Metal Exchange. "Technology is something that evolves, and it is not something to be used only by the techies," says C.P. Baid, President, BALCO. That would explain the 15 touch-screen kiosks placed strategically across BALCO's 2,700-acre township near Korba.

-Ritwik Mukherjee

BSNL
Big Daddy Of Broadband
It plans to wire up the whole nation.

BSNL's Dube: Talking broadband to the masses

At a mere 930,000 broadband connections at the end of December 2005, India may have fallen far short of its target of 3 million connections, but if Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has its way, millions of Indians will soon be cruising in cyberspace. The telco, India's largest with over 52 per cent share of the broadband market, plans to up the numbers to an impressive 4 million by next year. Its secret weapon: A spanking new National Internet Backbone project created at an investment, so far, of Rs 250 crore.

To be scaled up in stages, the project consists of an IP-based network backbone that would provide the base for other parts of the project, including a caller line identification (CLI)-based dial-up internet set-up all over the country, and always-on, high-speed broadband on ADSL technology, which is still being set up. (ADSL is asymmetric digital subscriber line, which is what your broadband service provider offers when you are able to download at 512 kbps, but upload at only half that speed.) The CLI-based dial-up will save the user the trouble of having to log on to the network, since the server will recognise the number and automatically log the user on. BSNL, which got Cisco and HCL to implement the network backbone, plans to ramp up broadband numbers from 550,000 in 244 cities to 1 million in 300 cities very soon, and further to 3 million in 600 cities by next year.

Apart from BSNL's own internet and broadband service, "the most modern network backbone in the world"-as the telco likes to describe it-supports virtual private networks, data services, and billing and system support. BSNL already has laid 71 nodes in different cities and is in the process of adding 30 more at various other locations. The plan is to bring all district headquarters within this network, putting 150 additional nodes by next year. As the network gets ramped up in stages, subscribers can expect to get better service. "BPO services running on this network backbone can be sure of getting most reliable and uninterrupted services," promises R.L. Dube, Director (Planning & New Services), BSNL.

Existing BSNL customers need not worry about having to ask for a switchover to the new network. They get automatically transferred to it. Currently, the network can handle 1 million subscribers (which means a lot of the bandwidth is actually underutilised), but BSNL will be raising the capacity to 4 million by next year. "The network backbone's capacity is enormous, and it is getting loaded now," says Dube.

Ladies and gentlemen, bring on the gigabits.

-Shaleen Agrawal

CPT's Suresh: Keeping an eye on it all

CHENNAI PORT TRUST
Turnaround Artist
If only the ships could be virtual too.

Chennai Port Trust chairman, K. Suresh, doesn't have to leave his office complex to find out what's happening at his busy port. Its Port Surveillance Management System, the only one of its kind in the country, uses 25 cameras to capture images at various vantage points across the port that then get transmitted to a satellite, which beams it back to an array of TV screens in a monitoring room. The system not just keeps port workers and officials on their toes, but is helpful in averting disasters. Like a recent incident, where a ship collided with a cable line and a small fire broke out. With the cameras watching, the ship was quickly alerted and the fire contained. Its surveillance system isn't the only reason why CPT is easily India's most wired port manager. In the last 18 months, the port has moved online (using mainly in-house expertise) all transactions relating to payments, refunds and Customs. Even tenders are placed online, as are orders for new equipment. "Our next goal is to reduce the complexity in cargo booking by using technology," says Suresh. That means locating, tracing and handing over containers to customers online. Although turnaround time is still fed manually into computers every six hours, close monitoring has upped throughput from 36 million tonnes in 2003-04 to 47 million tonnes in 2005-06.

-Nitya Varadarajan

CRISIL
Agile Business
It's a rating firm, KPO, newswire...

CRISIL's Shah: Look ma, not wires

Almost everyone knows that CRISIL is India's top credit rating agency. But few know that it also does outsourced equity research and offers real-time market news. And enabling Mumbai-based CRISIL's versatile growth is? "it is driving a lot of products in each area of our business," answers Hiren Shah, Director (Technology), CRISIL. Most of the agency's products are bundled as software and delivered online. It has tools and ratings on the web that clients can simply download from the net. Clients can also access CRISIL's research data online. In fact, the end-to-end workflow is fully automated, right from hiring to its finance and accounting function. "This, I think, is kind of unique," says Shah. The agency has a team of dedicated project managers who work with the businesses and help in implementing ideas that have it anchor points in the trade. But as Shah points out, CRISIL doesn't follow the latest technology blindly. Instead, it uses what makes most sense for it. But then, you wouldn't expect a credit rating agency to take on unnecessary risks, would you?

-Ahona Ghosh

Cultivating a change: For Andhra's farmers, help is just an e-mail away

eSAGU
Picture Perfect
Farmers in Andhra go digital.

Find it too expensive to take the internet and the pc to farmers? No problem. The Hyderabad-based International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), along with Media Lab Asia (an academic research programme seed funded by the Government of India), has come up with an innovative, low-cost solution to connect agri-experts with the state's farmers. Launched in 2004, the eSagu project (Sagu in Telugu means cultivation) works very simply. Providing the crucial link between the farmers and the agri-experts is a coordinator (typically an educated and experienced farmer himself), whose job it is to visit 25 to 30 farms every day between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. The coordinator takes a digital camera along to take pictures of the affected crop or animal that he gets burnt onto a CD and couriers it to the experts for as little as Rs 20. The experts examine the pictures and respond to the coordinator by e-mail, which is printed and read out to the farmers concerned. All this in a matter of 24 to 36 hours. Last year, the project covered 1,051 farms, with 14 coordinators and five agri-scientists. This year, it is getting extended to 5,000 farms, with 50 coordinators and 10 scientists. Two years ago, cotton was the only crop covered, but now there are six others, including rice and chillies. Expanding it to the whole of Andhra would mean covering 30,000 villages and 10 million farmers, involving an investment of Rs 720 crore on 6,000 centres (one for every five villages), besides a recurring cost of Rs 350 crore per annum. The estimated net benefit to the state: Rs 4,000 crore a year. "The programme can become self-sustaining," says P. Krishna Reddy, head of the project at IIIT, "if the farmers contribute just Re 1 per acre per day." The good news: Andhra's farmers are more than willing.

-E. Kumar Sharma

GATI
Smart Shipper
Box with brains.

GATI's Kumar: Making the leap

It serves 594 districts out of the 602 in the country, its customers can track shipments over the internet, mobile phone or e-mail, and even get automatic delivery acknowledgements on their cell phones. What makes all that possible at GATI? An in-house enterprise management system (called gems) that took Rs 20 crore and 30 months to design and implement. gems rides on a wide area network, connecting its 100-plus major locations via leased lines, while the rest of the locations connect to the central server using dial-up, broadband, cable or isdn connections. "In the last three years, we have moved to a position where we can handle double the business growth with marginal increase in people and infrastructure," boasts G.S. Ravi Kumar, GATI's CIO. Clearly, technology pays.

-E. Kumar Sharma

Geojit's George: He bet on technology easy on

GEOJIT SECURITIES
Of Mouse And Bull
It took online trading retail.

Where is one of India's largest retail brokerages located? No, not Mumbai, home to the two principal stock exchanges, but Cochin. If the odd location hasn't hurt Geojit's growth (its income in the first nine months of 2005-06 was Rs 60 crore), it is as much due to the firm's strong it backend as its offline presence. Developed jointly with Sun Microsystems, its Mercury Online System enables customers to trade remotely in a variety of financial instruments. "With only 35 phone lines, Geojit couldn't keep pace with the number of people wanting to trade, particularly in the morning rush hour," says Managing Director C.J. George, explaining how the firm made its online foray way back in 1998. It clicked.

-Kushan Mitra

ICICI LOMBARD
Wired To Serve
Meet anytime, anywhere agents.

There, your policy is ready: Generating a policy is a 10-minute job

Consider what a typical insurance agent at ICICI Lombard has to juggle on every sales call: 50 different products, each with multiple options and yet only one right fit for each client. The cost of getting it wrong isn't just an unhappy customer, but a hit to the bottom line; it costs 20-30 per cent of the first year's premium to acquire a customer. The top private general insurance company realised early on that it wouldn't make much headway doing business the traditional way. "We have always believed that having cutting-edge technology gives us a competitive edge," says Anuj Gulati, Head of it, ICICI Lombard. How does the cutting-edge technology manifest itself to the customer? By way of anytime, anywhere agents. Using a laptop or palmtop connected either to a broadband or dial-up line, the employee taps into a central server through a wide area network. There, he/she can access the advanced end-to-end policy issuance framework. "The system is designed to generate a policy in less than 10 minutes," says Kishore Badami, Senior Director, Citrix Systems India, which provided the cost-effective, scalable Meta Frame server software. Technology has played a key role in ICICI Lombard's quick ramp up. From just seven offices, 30 policies a day and Rs 22 crore in business in 2001, the insurer now manages 1,100 offices, 3,000 policies a day, and revenues of Rs 885 crore in 2004-05. "We believe that we are a technology-enabled distribution company," says Gulati. That's just the attitude the insurer may need to stay ahead of the pack.

-Venkatesha Babu

Click to complain: Empowering the people

KERALA
e-Governance State
Comrades learn to love their computers.

When the Kerala it mission first kicked off its e-governance and connectivity initiatives five years ago, Left-leaning state employee unions screamed bloody murder. But it didn't take too long to convince them otherwise. The "Friends" (fast, reliable, instant, efficient network for disbursement of services) centres for utility bill payments proved so popular (30 lakh transactions worth Rs 260 crore took place at these centres in 2005-06 alone) that the administration now feels emboldened to take its other it project, Akshaya, across the state. Not incidentally, the most backward district in North Kerala, Mallapuram, was chosen for the pilot Akshaya project, and today there are 450 such centres in it. "These centres provide not just internet access but allow people to pay a host of bills and access various government notifications, orders and bills online," says Anand Singh, Director, Kerala State Information Technology Mission. Many e-governance activities including e-parathi (District Collector's Grievance Redressal System) and Enrich (an initiative for grassroot-level data collection and publication through a website run by the National Informatics Centre) are run through these centres and the district administration is using the Akshaya Network to digitise 30 lakh birth, marriage and death registrations. According to Singh, the state government will cover the entire state by 2007, with every panchayat in the district housing two-three Akshaya centres. Good governance in Kerala, it seems, is round the corner.

-Rahul Sachitanand

KHADI & VILLAGE INDUSTRIES COMMISSION
Retailer To Rural India Inc.
Artisan's Best Friend.

A Khadi outlet: The bar code reader is a novelty

Not too long ago, the Khadi Gramodyog in Delhi couldn't tell exactly how many products were coming into its stores and how many were selling, not to mention those that either got damaged or lost in transit. Not any more. Under an ambitious it implementation programme, Khadi & Village Industries Commission (KVIC)-a mammoth organisation with Rs 13,105 crore in annual sales and presence in 300,000 villages-has begun wiring up its 33 agencies, called Khadi Gramodyogs. It's still a work in progress-only five of them, including Delhi and Mumbai, have been automated-but the results have quickly come in. The Delhi unit alone is expecting a 40 per cent jump in sales to Rs 100 crore in 2005-06. "Product bar coding and online billing and inventory management have streamlined day-to-day operations," says J.L. Chaudhuri, Deputy CEO of KVIC. "With the entire system becoming more efficient, the centres concerned have been able to save costs and even increase sales," he points out. Adds S.P. Singh, Director, Khadi Gramodyog, New Delhi: "We could handle much larger traffic last year, thanks to the new electronic system put in place."

The task of automating KVIC isn't easy. The 33 agencies have historically had a diffused structure, with each having its own set of vendors and sourcing arrangements. That means, the offices have to be connected at three levels. First, the local agencies have to be connected with their branches and godowns, of which there are at least three in every state capital. And then these branches have to be connected with KVIC. "Imagine what happens when all-India operations become online," says Singh. One gets the picture.

-Archna Shukla

Lucas-TVS's Nair: Not quite Toyota, but aiming the get there

LUCAS-TVS
Tier I Designs
It builds its own products.

In an industry, where suppliers largely work like job shops, Lucas-TVS is a vendor with ambition. A startling 65 per cent of the products in its portfolio-it makes a variety of electrical components such as starter motors and alternators-are due to its own R&D (The rest are licensed, mainly from some Japanese companies). It's easy to see why. More than 150 engineers and 50 technicians work in its new product development centre, with focus on three areas: new applications, new platforms and new technology. Since the computers are wired into various plants, the drawings can be shared with supervisors and plant floor engineers on a real-time basis. The company spent 3.5 per cent of its Rs 750 crore revenues on R&D in 2004-05, but plans to increase it to 4.5 per cent in 2006-07. The pay-off: A huge product pipeline; 120 applications are being developed for this financial year-an average of 12 per month. Says K.R.A. Nair, Executive Director (Development): "In the auto components industry, we would be among the largest on this front.'' Nair's goal next is to reduce the product development cycle time. Currently it takes anywhere between 15 and 18 months to develop a new product, and between four and eight months for a variant of an existing product. Nair hopes to shave off at least a couple of months from new product development cycle time.

-Nitya Varadarajan

MAHINDRA & MAHINDRA
Makes Cars And History Too
It's old economy only in name.

M&M's Goenka: Reviving up on customisation

When vehicle manufacturers launch a new car, they generally talk about how great the product is. Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M)'s Vice Chairman, Anand Mahindra, did too, when he launched the new souped up Scorpio. Only he didn't stop at that. "The All New Scorpio is evidence of our outrageous ambition," the dapper 50-year-old declared. It is impossible to overstate how important a role the SUV (sports utility vehicle) has played in boosting the company's fortunes. With a 43 per cent market share of the segment, the Scorpio is not just one of the best deals on four wheels, but a money-spinner for the company. After all, M&M has spent just Rs 800 crore on the Scorpio-a fraction of what global car giants spend on developing new cars. The 43 new features on the revamped Scorpio were developed largely in-house. Even the new five-link rear suspension was developed by M&M's own engineers, although UK's Lotus Engineering helped fine-tune it.

The Scorpio, as Mahindra likes to say, is a symbol of the new it-savvy, global M&M. It was born of a new design and manufacturing philosophy (Integrated Design and Manufacturing) and continues to use state-of-the-art it in distribution as well. Every dealer and vendor is connected to the M&M network, allowing it to manage a complex supply chain and make more accurate predictions about demand. Recently, M&M undertook a massive project to consolidate its it core under one roof rather than having it spread out over tens of locations. 'Project Sankraman', as it was called, has allowed it to further streamline its supply chain.

But talk to the Scorpio engineer and CEO of M&M's Automotive Sector, Pawan Goenka, and he'll tell you that Scorpio customers haven't seen anything yet. He says that M&M's new "Customised Vehicles" division will take car-buying experience to a new level by allowing buyers to customise the vehicle. "This is going to be a major market for us," says Goenka. Once again, what makes customisation possible is M&M's robust it back-end and an enterprise-wide system that maintains details of each and every part that goes into its vehicles.

But as the company looks abroad for much of its future growth, especially in the outsourcing field, technology will play an ever-increasing role. Mahindra Systems and Automotive Technology (MSAT), one of M&M's newer ventures, is counting on highly engineered projects to power its growth in the global ancillary industry. "If India is going to become an ancillary powerhouse, then it has to make use of its engineering and it prowess, and you don't get much better than a group that does both old fashioned mechanical engineering and is a leader in it (through Tech Mahindra, formerly Mahindra-bt)," says Hemant Luthra, CEO, MSAT. That's a new age, old-economy company talking.

-Kushan Mitra

MMFSL Managing Director Ramesh Iyer: Reaching out to the masses

M&M FINANCIAL SERVICES
Breaking Barriers
Because its customers are in small towns.

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd (MMFSL) was born out of a need: Most of the people parent company M&M sold its tractors and utility vehicles to had no access to means of traditional finance. It was up to M&M to figure out how to deliver credit, and MMFSL turned out to be the answer. (That, however, didn't prepare the firm for EMIs or equated monthly instalments paid in coins, like some customers did initially.) Yet, as its CEO Ramesh Iyer would tell you, what seems like a low-tech job is actually powered by a tremendously capable wide area network that reaches more than 200 of MMFSL's 300 branches. More impressively, the company is adding two to three branches to the network every week. How much time does it take to wire up the new branches? From the time MMFSL places an order with its partners to the time the branch is connected and running with fully trained staff manning the system, it is exactly three working weeks.

The company concedes that the availability of infrastructure has improved dramatically in the past few years, but there are places such as parts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, where there is no connectivity at all. "In some of those places, despite the costs involved, we have decided to implement a VSAT (very small aperture terminal) solution," says Dinesh Prajapati, it Chief at MMFSL. With its network growing, business is surging too. By December 2005, the company had disbursed loans worth Rs 3,668 crore-a figure that's growing fast. How fast? Forty per cent in the first three quarters of last financial year.

-Kushan Mitra

OXIGEN
Virtual Operator
Convenient talk time vendor.

An Oxigen outlet: Easy recharge

If India's cellular operators are the protagonists of the telecom revolution, a side-role is being played by the Gurgaon-based India Prepaid Services, which operates 19,000 recharge points (branded Oxigen) across the country. Oxigen's business model is simple: It "collects" talk time from operators and stores it on its servers, from where it is distributed to retail points on demand. The retail point, in turn, connects to a local server through a terminal (see photo) or through a mobile phone loaded with a special application provided by Oxigen. So when a customer comes to Oxigen for a recharge, the retailer logs a request on the server, and the concerned operator credits the customer's account. "All the services that are used in a household on a recurring basis can be brought on a single platform, and Oxigen intends to do that," says Pramod Saxena, Executive Chairman, Oxigen. Neat.

-Shaleen Agrawal

A GramIT centre: You would have never guessed this is a village scene

(SATYAM) GRAMIT
The Future Of BPO?
Say hello to a rural backoffice.

Not infrequently, whenever someone applies to Satyam Computer for a job, chances are the person's competencies would have been fed into the central database of the company from a remote location called Jallikakinada, a small village of 1,600 people and about 500 km away from Hyderabad. This low-end, nevertheless critical, internal support work has been outsourced by Satyam to Gramit, which is arguably India's first rural BPO (business process outsourcing) centre. With 50 seats, employing a hundred employees in two shifts (6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.), and 20 km from the nearest degree college (a necessary pre-condition), this is the first GramIT centre of the Byrraju Foundation. Supported by the promoters of Satyam Computer, the foundation refurbished an ice factory in the village and in August last year launched the BPO. Since then, the foundation has opened another GramIT in Eethakota village in the East Godavari district, again about 500 km from Hyderabad, employing another 100. By end of April this year, it hopes to add yet another centre and by year-end have 10 to 15 centres, each with a similar headcount. Each of the GramIT centres, which may soon be franchised out, is being built to handle work related to hr, accounting and vendor-related bill processes. Apart from Satyam, there are two other large corporates and the rural development department of the state government that outsource work to it. "Our aim is to capture at least 50 per cent of the internal support services of all the corporates we tie up with," says K. Sharath Choudary, 42, who leads this initiative at the foundation. It costs about Rs 50 lakh to set up a GramIT, and the employees earn Rs 4,000-5,000 a month. Potentially, Choudhary says, each centre can do Rs 1.5 crore in annual business. What next? A listing on the NASDAQ?

-E. Kumar Sharma

SERUM INSTITUTE OF INDIA
IT Is The Lifeline
World-class vaccine maker.

Serum's Mehta: Committed to tech

Quality standards in global pharma are some of the toughest of any industry. Take a walk through Serum Institute of India's Pune facility and you'll know exactly how tough. Its aseptic vial filling line washes, sterilises, packs and seals without any human intervention, and is accurate to the third decimal point (in filling). It also has the largest computerised facility in India for freeze-drying parenterals for longer shelf life. It is this commitment to technology that has enabled Serum to become India's largest vaccine exporter. "It's a business initiative incorporated with it," says Aroon Mehta, Head (it), of the new ERP (enterprise resource planning) system at Serum. In the months ahead, the institute plans to bring in new systems like manufacturing resource planning and customer relationship management. What Serum makes is a lifeline to many around the world, but Serum's own lifeline seems to be it.

-Ahona Ghosh

SBI everywhere: Now, ATMs on ferries

STATE BANK OF INDIA
Don't Call It A PSU
Well, it doesn't think like one.

Guess who operates the world's only floating ATM (automated teller machine)? Nope, not Citibank or ICICI Bank, but good old State Bank of India (SBI). Sounds unbelievable, but it is true. Fitted on board a ferry (see picture), the ATM runs on the CDMA (code-division multiple access) technology and attracts regular ferry commuters and foreign tourists who visit Kerala's famous backwaters. Here's some more unbelievable stuff about SBI. The floating ATM is just a small demonstration of its growing it prowess. Although the country's biggest bank was late to board the IT bandwagon-it did so only in 2000-it hasn't looked back since. Today, all of its 9,141 branches (not counting those of associate banks) have been computerised, and there are 5,290 SBI ATMs across the country-the largest of any bank. "There were apprehensions in the market, but we proved everybody wrong by successfully implementing our it strategy," says Syed Shahabuddin, Chief General Manager (IT), SBI, who oversees an annual it spend of about Rs 700 crore.

Its treasury and asset liability management (ALM) operations-the backbone of any bank-have also been fully automated, and SBI is now focussing on enhancing it usage. And that does seem to be the bigger challenge for the bank. Why? The reasons have to do with its customer profile. Not only does SBI have a strong rural focus, even in urban centres it is a banker to a slightly older population that still feels more comfortable dealing with a real teller than an ATM. The result: SBI today has the largest credit card base of 17.32 million, but the ATM usage as a percentage of total banking transaction is a paltry 3 per cent. Similarly, out of a total 35 million transactions per day in the bank, only 1 million are through its ATMs.

One bright spot for the bank is internet banking. Possibly because it offers a variety of features (you can pay your utility bills and taxes, invest in mutual fund schemes, and book train tickets, besides checking account and transferring funds), the number of users is growing. There are 650,000 active users currently, and their population is growing at more than 50 per cent a year. SBI may have been slow off the starting block, but it is rapidly catching up with the other it-savvy banks.

-Anand Adhikari

VIMTA LABS
Bridging Distances
Your remote CRO next door.

Vimta Lab's Vasireddi: Big plans and big budgets

We want to be among the top 10 contract research and testing organisations globally by 2010," declares S.P. Vasireddi, Chairman and Managing Director of the Hyderabad-based clinical research organisation (CRO), Vimta Labs. It's hard not to take him seriously, because the 56-year-old entrepreneur sports an impressive track record. Setting out in 1984 as a single-bench analytical lab, Vimta moved into CRO services in 1994 and now sees itself as a "full service CRO", offering everything from bioequivalence studies to clinical trials to global and Indian customers. And to prove that he is serious about his goal, Vasireddi is putting money where his mouth is. Consider the research process outsourcing (RPO) hub, or customer-specific research lab, that he is setting up. Spread over 10.7 acres in Hyderabad's Genome Valley, the 2-lakh sq. ft facility boasts of 40 walk-in cold rooms, a captive laboratory and a modern it network (outsourced to IBM) that'll offer remote access to global customers. Investment in the facility: Rs 50 crore; Vimta's revenues: Rs 52 crore in 2004-05. "Investment on the network alone is 20 per cent of the project cost," informs Vasireddi. When your customers are thousands of miles away, a superlative it network has to be your passport to the world.

-E. Kumar Sharma

Wockhardt's Bali: Hospital with a heart

WOCKHARDT HOSPITALS
De-stress Docs
It's about wholesome healing.

Every time someone is wheeled into a hospital, it's often the patient's loved ones that face more anxiety and stress. Wockhardt Hospitals knows that only too well. That is why the six-hospital chain, which has a tie-up with Harvard Medical, is focussed on not just patient care, but patient information. Outside the operation theatres and intensive care units of every Wockhardt hospital, there is an array of plasma displays that constantly updates relatives and friends of the patient. (Even relatives abroad can find the updates online, and make payments online should there be a need.) No hi-tech hi-jinx, but a sure sign the hospital cares. "You have no idea how much tension this alone has reduced in our waiting rooms," says Vishal Bali, CEO of the hospital chain. With six additional hospitals on the drawing board, Wockhardt is building an information back-end that'll connect all its hospitals and allow doctors to tap into medical history of patients registered with the chain. Some day, that could save some patient his life.

-Kushan Mitra