'Bandwidth will determine how the technologies are adopted in this company'- Balu Doraiswamy, MD, Compaq Computer India

Prior to his appointment as MD of Compaq Computer India in June 1999, Balu

Doraisamy was director, Asia Accounts, Asia Pacific Division of the company. He joined Digital Equipment Corporation in USA in 1983 as a senior engineer, corporate software engineering and then worked as a technology consultant, advanced system development in 1986. Subsequently he moved to Digital Equipment Asia Pacific, Singapore in 1990 as Director, Sales and Marketing, Global Accounts and Telecom Expertise Center. Balu, during his short tenure with Compaq, has developed effective direct accounts teams and technical support and services teams. He tells CI how he wants to boost his channel to sell Compaq's new handheld device,

iPaq.

Compaq had claimed in July that iPaq would replace Aero and be available in the country within a month. But it is still not available. Why?

The iPaq Pocket PC will be launched by the end of this quarter. This particular product has a special feature. It has this great facility in terms of making it available for customers to dial in through a GSM. And link or use it in WAP technology and access applications on the backend and initiate immediate transactions. So we are increasing our manufacturing capacities for this product. We will be releasing large volumes in September by which time it will be available in the market.

But do you think that this product will take off in the country?

What it brings is a new application area for people who are in the sales profession and who are moving around and they will be the key people who will be using this product. For example, the man on the street can initiate transactions, do the balance and manage the inventory as well as check mails. Our infrastructure is improving both in terms of GSM as well as the broadband technology. With this product, we believe that we are in a very unique position to have more access availability for an immediate transaction initiation and making quick buying decisions online while still on the move. Whether it is a sales call or getting important information or providing services while you are at your customer's site.

We believe that this product will be ideal for customers who are looking for mobile technology. And to compliment this technology, we are coming out with a back-end storage and server technology. As customers consolidate their SAP or database environment, we will write an application for them with the help of our alliance partners so the handheld can access databases.

Initially we will not. Since the handheld has many smaller components and a smaller customer base, it will be imported. We just started manufacturing notebooks. We are now moving to servers. So depending on volumes and the benefits that we are going to get in terms of duties and taxes, we will consider manufacturing locally.

We are working with many of them, both in terms of ISPs and portals as well as many of the players in the GSM market. And at present it is more a discussion, as many of them are looking at it more as an application where this product can be used more than just a digital diary for a particular customer environment. So we are now working with a couple of alliance partners to actually pilot the technology for large customers. Though I cannot reveal any names now, we are clearly working on a pilot with a multinational customer. We are already working with two customers who can download or upload information relevant to them. Some banks and brokers have also shown a keen interest.

The bandwidth will always determine the growth of both PCs and handhelds. But bandwidth today is higher than what it was earlier. If you compare last year as against the current fiscal you will see that even the mobile phone penetration has increased. The growth has to happen in a country like this where the infrastructure is complicated, where a lot of large corporates have multiple manufacturing and distribution and selling models and the customers are all spread over. There is a need for this kind of technology.

And there are many who are putting together a broadband network. More investments are going into creating the bandwidth. Then there are people who already have bandwidth like the GSM service providers. And it is possible to write an application that is going to use minimal bandwidth to send minimal data.

Transfer of data over the bandwidth is going to be so minimal, the way the technology is developed. And as long as you write applications that are specific it will continue to challenge bandwidth. And with the increase of bandwidth, technology like handhelds will become more affordable. But we agree that bandwidth will determine how the technologies are adopted in this company.

At the end of the day, you want to connect to the Internet and download certain relevant information. Even if people can initiate one transaction a day, the product will have its own value.

For our handhelds as of today, we have a software that will treat it as a smart card. So it is more of a software-based technology than a hardware-based one. We are currently working on the hardware option too because it is the same technology.