Billion Dollar BPL to Cast the Net in India
BPL Systems
bplsys.com
BPL Shop
bplshop.com
Futue home on the Web of BPL.net
bplnet.com
By Uday Lal Pai
India Correspondent, asia.internet.com
[November 9, 1999--MUMBAI] India's telecom major BPL Telecom Business Group is all set to launch its ISP services in a month's time.
In an exclusive interview with asia.internet.com, the high profile, young chairman of BPL Telecom, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the ISP service would be launched in 11 cities through three gateways in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.
The BPL Telecom, the largest cellular operator in the country in terms of subscriber base, would be using its existing broadband infrastructure to ensure high and speedy quality of data transfer. " With the largest cellular backbone in the country encompassing 5,000 km, BPL can leverage it to provide the killer application which will ensure the convergence between telecom and datacomm," Rajeev said.
The company, christened as 'BPLNet.com' is expected to take a lead role in convergence in India. Given its lead position in electronics and telecom, this is a possible task for the BPL Group, felt analysts in India. BPL Telecom is a part of $1.1 billion BPL Group in India.
Rajeev says that Internet appliances like the Net set and home PCs are on his list of priority. The Internet appliances products would bear the names - 'net.set', 'net.tv', 'net.pc' and MP3 players. The Internet services will have a brand name 'OYEINDIA'
"While addressing areas like web content, design and development services, the company will be building upon its domain knowledge in telecom services and products," said Rajeev. Incidentally BPL operates the largest wireless franchise in the country and has been manufacturing telecom products such as EPABX, PBT for many years.
"We address the customer need to enable their existing application software to effectively leverage the Internet. Our competencies are in interfacing/integration of existing software applications to the Web." Rajeev, who worked at Intel for six years and was CPU architect in the Pentium team, said.
"We are also in the process of providing E-Commerce solutions that will represent end-to-end business solutions that will integrate the customer's existing information systems infrastructure to the E-Commerce processes."he added.
BPLNet.com will also offer content and design solutions to the Internet market. The web services team is divided into 2 groups. One to focus on the portals that we are launching - a lifestyle portal, focusing preliminary on the youth and a business portal providing business related services to the browser. This would include a business-to-business portal, stock related information, business analysis etc.
The second group focuses on the web design for corporates. The focus is on building smarter sites that would foster communities for the corporates.
The company source said that over the years BPL has developed tremendous domain knowledge in the areas of Telecom, Datacomm and Convergence Technologies in general and knowledge and skill sets in the key areas of switching, call processing, voice processing, CTI, digital signal processing, voice over IP, Internet appliances, terminal equipment et el. "Our focus will be increasingly in the area of convergence technologies which will drive market growth in the future. We are quietly placed to address this market," Rajeev says.
A 15-acre campus, code named 'Innovision,' is being readied on the outskirts of Bangalore to take care of BPLNET and IT-solutions.
To leverage the global opportunities in software development and Internet solutions, a subsidiary, BPL systems in Atlanta, has been set up in the US. The company also proposes to expand our operations to Europe and Japan shortly with a hub to be set up either in Amsterdam or London.
Incidentally, the total assets of the BPL Telecom business alone exceeds US$670 million and with about 2500 employees, manufactures a range of telecom systems and IT products and solutions, has a state of the art design and development facility and provides cellular and paging services in the most prosperous regions in India. |
