The Hindu Business Line : Meeting point

Travel less. Meet online. It’s easy and affordable — and a great way to work green.” So urges the Web site of WebEx, which offers online meeting applications. Founded in 1996, the company was acquired by Cisco in May 2007. And now, “WebEx products are being integrated into Cisco’s expanding portfolio of collaboration products and services based on Web 2.0 technologies.”

When one chooses WebEx, there’s no need to worry about ports, platforms, versions, firewalls — or even the Internet, says the company. “All you need to run effective online meetings is a browser and a phone.”

For more on what’s happening at the ‘meeting’ point, eWorld met Kiran Datar, Managing Director, WebEx Communications India Pvt Ltd.

Excerpts from the interaction:

What got you interested in ‘conferencing’ as a space to enter?

There are a couple of reasons that I became interested in ‘conferencing’.

When we came back to India to start a business 10 years go, we had planned to provide bandwidth services. We wanted to become an Internet service provider. We wanted to create a portal and drive content to that. Unfortunately, we discovered that regulations at the time prevented us from entering the ISP space as it was a government monopoly.

Therefore, we were forced to change our plans and to test the market, we did a little research. We found a huge surge in telecom availability but an absence of any sort of collaboration services.

Given the IT revolution that India was undergoing at the time, we saw that a lot of companies had overseas clients and an efficient collaboration system was necessary. This is how the Audio Conferencing Solution by CyberBazaar was born.

It was a flagship service to provide end-to-end services in this segment. Through this solution, it was possible for multiple people to be connected to a single conference call.

The name Cyberbazaar evokes images of a portal for e-commerce. Was that your original intention? And, talking about e-commerce, what are your views on its evolution in India?

Cyberbazaar was not intended to be a conferencing company; it was primarily set to be an ISP and a portal with a marketplace for business services.

e-commerce in India is still very much in its infancy.

The main constraint to adoption of e-commerce has been the lack of infrastructure, primarily bandwidth and lack of widespread PC penetration within individual homes.

Another hurdle to e-commerce is the Indian mindset. We love to bargain and get the best deal for our money. With online transactions there is no haggling. Security can hamper e-commerce too as most Indians do not feel that their information is safe online.

There are promising signs on the horizon, though, that indicate that many of the infrastructure bottlenecks are being addressed, both by service providers and content creators. Indeed, in the last few years, a number of travel-related e-commerce portals have sprung up that have been widely adopted by the general population.

An example of e-commerce that astonishes me is the Indian Railways portal, IRCTC.com.

A few years ago, one would never have imagined that we would see Indians buying railway tickets online in such large numbers.

Can you tell us about the types of ‘conferencing’ and the popular revenue models? How do you charge your customers?

There are three types of ‘conferencing’:

Audio or Tele-Conferencing: This is the most basic type of conferencing and involves real-time voice collaboration

Video Conferencing: Involves collaboration of video and voice.

Web Conferencing: A much more rich experience that combines voice, video and data sharing, which is enabled over either the Internet or the intranet.

There are two types of revenue models:

The subscription model, which is a fixed fee, per user, for unlimited use through one month.

The second type is a pay as you go model where you pay according to your usage.

We have both models available to our customers. However, the subscription model is the more popular.

A fact sheet about the company, its revenues, head count.

With 2.3 million registered users, WebEx, now a part of Cisco, is a global leader in on-demand applications for collaborative business on the Web. These applications enhance high-touch business processes, such as sales and training, with efficient Web-touch interactions.

As an on-demand provider, WebEx seeks to facilitate both internal and external collaboration.

Our company delivers its range of applications over the WebEx MediaTone Network, a global network specifically designed for the secure delivery of on-demand applications.

Our applications support multipoint video conferencing, web conferencing, telework and application remote control.

WebEx is the leading provider of Audio and Video Conferencing, Web Casting, and Web Conferencing in India. WebEx Communications India has the largest market share of 69 per cent and a list comprising over 1,700 customers from India’s top companies. WebEx Communications India is currently headquartered in Bangalore.

Audio Conferencing is a flagship service and WebEx provides end-to-end services in this segment.

We are pioneers in audio conferencing and have created the market for this segment in India.

Headcount: 430 – all India

How big is conferencing, as a market? Frost & Sullivan states that the Web conferencing market will grow at a rate of 30 per cent a year and by 2010, revenue is estimated to increase to $3 billion.

Have any estimates been made of the costs that conferencing saves, or the benefits it creates?

The business benefits of conferencing are in terms of:

Increase in productivity due to time saved in travelling and logistics around a meeting

Cost of travel saved, which would include cost of transportation (by air, road, sea)

Reduction of carbon footprint — due to the reduction in fossil fuels used during physical travel

Web collaboration can improve productivity while lowering costs by offering ‘anytime anywhere’ communications. This impacts the bottom line and will always improve profitability. It has been estimated that conferencing can save up to 80-90 per cent of travel costs.

We have two case studies: one on cost savings by a company, and the second on Productivity Benefits — Frost & Sullivan study. Are there successful business models that people have built around your conferencing solutions?

Yes, there have been several successful business models that have been developed around the capability to meet online and conduct trainings, do technical support or simply reach and collaborate with people across great distances.

For example, we have a customer who has created an offshore compliance training business in India.

They are delivering training on accounting standards and compliance issues surrounding Sarbanes-Oxley regulations in the US and charge people to come and attend these trainings.

Another customer has established a technical support capability that does remote infrastructure management as well as helpdesk support for customers across the globe.

What are the top five complaints your customers bring up?

Some of the issues brought up most often by our customers are those that deal with difficulties in joining a session on the Web, bandwidth constraints in the last mile or latency during sharing of bandwidth heavy applications.

Most of these issues are solved by giving appropriate training to the users and in case of bandwidth problems, by increasing availability of quality connections in most parts of the country.

How robust is your technology?

We deliver our web collaboration capability on the WebEx MediaTone Network, which is designed to deliver always-available ‘dial-tone’ reliability for the delivery of global multimedia web communications. It operates at 50 per cent capacity to accommodate any peaks in customer usage and has an availability target of 99.99 per cent to serve your needs — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. From a security standpoint, we also have a WebTrust and SAS70 certification, which are awarded for trustworthy e-commerce and secured controls and safeguards. As an example, all meetings are encrypted so you can conduct even a most sensitive meeting with the confidence that the information will remain private.

What have been the recent developments in communications and networking that are of relevance to conferencing?

Recent developments in communications and networking that are of relevance to conferencing are:

Increasing availability of bandwidth and PC sales in the country

Increasing tele-density in the country

Reducing long-distance call charges, both domestic and international

Do you think ‘conferencing’ using technology is effective in organisations with the right mindset?

Yes, it is very effective with those who have the ‘right mindset’ but is also effective in organisations where adaptations happens at a slower rate.

As someone who started off as an entrepreneur, how have you coped with going through acquisitions?

Learning the ropes, and then doing better for the company when it moves from being a start-up to a mature company is an exciting journey. At the same time, I think the entrepreneurial qualities that are required in start-ups will help you to adapt, learn and grow in larger companies.

On the ‘going green’ trend…

Webex can help in reducing environmental impact. Being ‘Green’ is not just a new trend but fast becoming a necessity for all of us who want to save our planet. We help our customers to take simple steps to reduce their environmental impact and carbon emissions by reducing travel; both business travel to meetings and events and commuting by employees.

It’s very simple: Whether you travel by airplane or car to your meetings, you are emitting GHGs (greenhouse gas). Meeting/Collaborating on WebEx avoids GHG emissions and avoids harm to the environment.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Related Stories:
India is key to Cisco’s globalisation strategy
Cisco’s new biz plan has strong regional focus
Navaraga Info unveils collaborative Web solution
Patent office launches interactive Web services