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February, 2002 COUNTRY BUZZ |
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COMPUTER BUSINESS Cisco India develops networking switch The device, called Langford, is a customised version of the Cisco Works 2000 suite. The Indian arm has alone contributed $120 million to the network management division's global turnover of $200 million.
For Cisco Systems, India is fast becoming a crucial base for supporting the firm's global development requirements. During the last calendar year, the company's Cisco Works 2000 suite of products-fully designed, developed and owned by Cisco India-alone contributed $120 million (around Rs 580 crore) to the firm's network management division's global turnover of $200 million (Rs 970 crore). Cisco ships over 1,000 copies of the Cisco Works 2000 per month from the country to support over 40,000 customers around the world. Cisco India has added another feather in its cap. It has developed Langford, a customised version of the Cisco Works 2000 suite for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The new product has entirely been developed in India and will be marketed in Asian and European countries. Bill Ahlstrom, Cisco's senior director of the enterprise management business unit, said the firm has plans to grow its operations in the country at all levels. "In India, the firm's enterprise management business division focuses on core product documentation and marketing strategies. The Indian unit has complete ownership of the entire range of Cisco Works 2000 management applications and is also responsible for the development of Langford." Praising Indian engineers, he said, "We are very comfortable with Indian engineers as they are culturally and linguistically compatible. The country has a world-class talent pool and we will continue to grow our activities here to cash in on this. We are keen to expand our overall Indian operations, including personnel acquisition from entry to senior management levels," he said. In addition to individual projects, the Indian division jointly works with its US counterparts on devices like Voice Health Monitor, a product based on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) that troubleshoots, manages and monitors data network. Cisco Systems recently acquired a firm that builds VoIP telephones. "We are jointly working on a newer version of the product, which will be released soon. We are involved in the development of software for VoIP-based products," he added. Globally, Cisco's enterprise management business unit has over 700 engineers of which around 300 are in India. The division has management and development partnerships with HCL Systems in India and Smarts in the US, while it has marketing tie-ups with 20 companies across the world. Purple
Yogi dons new garb
As an entrepreneur, Rakesh Mathur (of the Purple Yogi and Junglee fame) wants to be the "Oracle" of unstructured data. Having decided on the growth plans for Purple Yogi, he along with Ramana Venkata, co-founder and CTO of the firm, thought that a major step would be to give a new and serious look to the organisation. And the first thing to happen was a change in the name from Purple Yogi to Stratify Inc. Today, it has also managed to attract funds from an unanticipated quarter, America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Neither the CIA nor the firm will disclose the exact amount of the funding, for fear of offending the CIA's portfolio firms, which have recieved less. However, market sources say it was more than $1 million (Rs 4.83 crore) but less than $5 million (Rs 24 crore). Says Ramana Venkata, "We thought the company should have a more serious name as opposed to the "dotcomish" name Purple Yogi. Hence we decided on Stratify. This was also done to some extent to beat the negative sentiment associated with Net firms." The CIA, after having bought Stratify's software, picked up equity in the organisation mainly because the technology, which the company is working on at present, is vital for its operations. "All this started happening even before the September 11 attacks in the US. The funding came in only after the incidents. Immediately before the attacks, the CIA had been anticipating a disaster. But unable to match those pieces of information, the CIA couldn't act in time to prevent the tragedy. Our software is into piecing together unstructured data. This helps organisations to take considered decisions," Venkata said. Structured data in an organisation is considered to be just 20 per cent, while unstructured data, like documents,proposals, meeting minutes, etc., constitute the rest. "For structured data we have database software like Oracle. But for unstructured data, there is hardly any software that helps an enterprise to use and reuse it. Our software is not meant for just intelligence agencies like the CIA; even firms like Infosys are using it," Venkata said. Stratify provides a complete enterprise software platform that helps firms harness vast amount of corporate information by automating the process of organising, classifying and presenting business-critical, unstructured information that is usually found in documents, presentations and Web pages. By structuring previously difficult-to-organise information, Stratify's technology increases the value of existing corporate applications, such as enterprise search engines, news aggregation services, customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation tools (SFA), content management software and corporate portals. Launched at the peak of the dotcom boom, Purple Yogi had managed to secure $15.3 million (Rs 74 crore) in new equity funding. In December 2000, the software company got an additional round of $13.8 million (Rs 66.6 crore) funding. Investors included Softbank Venture Capital, Intel Capital, AtIndia, Skyblaze and Infosys Technologies. The name of its Indian subsidiary in Bangalore, which is basically into research and development, is still Purple Yogi India; there are plans to change this name in due course of time. PC sales
remain sluggish The desktop PC market grossed 8.03 lakh units during the first half of 2001-02, registering a negative growth of 4 per cent over the same period in the previous year and a negative growth of 23 per cent compared to the second-half of 2000-01. PC sales had shown a growth of 34 per cent over that of 1999-2000 in the financial year 2000-01. According to apex hardware forum Manufacturers' Association of Information Technology (MAIT), the severe recessionary trend in the Indian economy has adversely impacted the hardware market. Based on poor buying sentiments in the market, MAIT has revised its 2001-02 sales projection from 2.45 million units to 1.65 million units.
Assembled PCs accounted for 44 per cent of PC sales in the first half of 2001-02. The proportion of assembled PC sales shrunk from 59 per cent in the same period the previous year-a negative growth of 28 per cent. The poor performance in the assembled market has resulted in the southward growth of the entire PC market, reflecting the fact that price sensitive market segments deferred their IT purchase plans in the first half of the current financial year. However, multinational brands maintained a robust performance-a market share of 36 per cent, up from 24 per cent in the first half of 2000-01, registering a growth of 44 per cent. The Indian brands accounted for 20 per cent of the market. The share of Indian brands during the same period the previous year was 17 per cent. The MAIT review reveals that PC sales to the business segment declined by 1.5 per cent, while to households it declined by 11 per cent as compared to the sales in the first half of the previous financial year. The business segment continued to account for 78 per cent of the market. In terms of processor configuration, PC sales in the first half of the financial year under study were dominated by Intel's Pentium-III 550 MHz processors, accounting for 47 per cent of the market share, followed by Pentium 4 (19 per cent). Printer sales dropped by 18 per cent compared to those in the first half of 2000-01. Sales of dot-matrix printers fell by 3 per cent; laser printers by 21 per cent and inkjet printers by 32 per cent. Large firms that accounted for 31 per cent of the dot-matrix sales registered a positive growth of 16 per cent, while small and medium sectors witnessed negative growth of 3 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively. Dot-matrix printers accounted for 54 per cent of the market share; inkjet printers for 37 per cent and laser printers for 9 per cent. The server market declined by 6 per cent in the first half of 2001-02 over the corresponding period of 2000-01. Top four metropolitan cities accounted for 85 per cent of the total server sales. Consumption of servers in larger businesses grew by 42 per cent, accounting for 58 per cent of the server sales. The networking market also reflected poor consumption in the domestic market. The market had been one of the fastest growing segments in the infotech industry. However, in the first half of 2001-02, sales of NICs (network interface cards) grew by only 12 per cent and hubs by 6 per cent. The modem market declined by 21 per cent.
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