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WebEx Communications Inc deserves to be more famous than it is. Just seven years old, this San Jose-based provider of web-conferencing services was recently ranked No 1 in a Forbes listing of the fastest growing tech companies. The Nasdaq-listed $140-million WebEx boasts of a compound annualised revenue growth of 186 per cent over the last five years, and its co-founder, the 40-something Subrah S. Iyar, designated Chairman & CEO, was in India recently. In an interview with BT Online's Priya Srinivasan, he talks about growth. Q: 'Fast growing tech company' almost sounds like a contradiction in terms, these days. What is it that you've managed to get right? A. (Laughs). We obviously have something people really want. The value proposition is clear. The barriers to get started on our service are very low from the customer viewpoint. Nobody likes to travel on business if it's not necessary, and our service allows for online collaboration. Success finally boils down to a few obvious things -- the value proposition cannot be convoluted, and how much money the customer is willing to put upfront matters. We never gave anything free. We started before the Internet boom, and never fell into the 'eyeballs' trap or got involved with VCs until just before we went public. Q. VCs must have chased you at the height of the tech boom, didn't they? A. Yes, VCs would keep coming up, but we did not want to be in a position where we had to listen to anyone. We finally took in NEA and Walden just before our IPO, in July 2000. Q. You have competition from no less than the likes of Intel, IBM and Microsoft, each of whom have products to service some part of your market. How do you manage to stay ahead in the marketplace? A. Most of the big companies have approached it as a software business, while we deal with it as a service. We have worked hard on areas like -- compatibility, reliability, interactivity, security and running the service at a profitable price point. Q. Microsoft has recently acquired one of your key competitors, Placeware. How do you plan to deal with the Microsoft muscle? A. When we came into the market, Placeware had 45 per cent marketshare. Today, it's down to 19 per cent. Basically, they are single-function oriented -- mostly Powerpoint on HTML. On the Microsoft issue, the company tends to load all its features on the front-end in a bid to get the user to buy more and more, which introduces incompatibility, whereas all our intelligence is in our central office and we focus on compatibility all the time. I am simply a third party outsourced meeting service provider. Q. What sort of market are you seeing in India for your service? A. I expect India to account for at least 15 per cent of the global market in the next three years. I have been approached by a lot of Indian companies who are getting squeezed by the visa regulations and they want solutions in the event of not being able to send people overseas. Especially as Indian companies move up the value chain, collaborative meetings will become a necessity.
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