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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (10193)	12/21/1999 7:55:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Khosla and Ragavan team up to foster networking company Ela Dutt fe New York, Dec 21: Building companies is a hobby for these two Indian American IT entrepreneurs, so when they join hands you can imagine the kind of networking at hand. Vinod Khosla, general partner at the leading venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KPSB), along with Vivek Ragavan, CEO of Siara Systems, will soon be on the board of Redback Networks Inc, to date the leading equipment manufacturer for advanced high speed Internet traffic. The merger of Redback with Siara after the $4.3 billion acquisition of the latter will be completed in March 2000. Both Redback and Siara have a string of Indian Americans associated with making the companies what they are today. "I enjoy helping build companies. This is my principal hobby," he said. The Pune-born Khosla, 44, was brought up in Delhi and is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, with a masters from Carnegie-Mellon and an MBA from Stanford University. He came to the US in 1976. According to Khosla, "There is a huge new market in the access segment where the future requirements are very different from the past requirements." Khosla, who has been instrumental in funding several successful start-ups by Indian Americans while with KPSB since 1986, was co-founder of Sun Microsystems. "Growing the company is what consumes me right now," said Ragavan. His all-consuming passion at the moment is to grow Siara, a leading edge supplier of next generation platforms and network operations software for the New Access Network. "Hopefully Siara/Redback can dominate this $20 to $40 billion market!," is what Chennai-born Ragavan, 47, envisages. He came to the US in 1970, got his degrees in electrical engineering from Northwestern University, Chicago, and Cornell University, Ithaca, after which he immediately joined the telecom industry starting with Comsat. The networking market, he emphasises, "is changing and growing as we speak" and hence the surge in demand for new services and new products and the growth of a whole slew of service-providers. This is leading to the growth of several new companies with core competence to service this growth. "We believe we are one of them and can fulfil the long-term growth needs." Siara, he emphasises, will be a leading player in the next generation in infrastructure equipment. Ragavan joined Siara in mid-1998 when it was a newly started company and had just 50 people. Today 175 highly trained persons have been attracted to this company, specialists in silicon design, ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) and microprocessor design, IT routing, optical networking, and networking management. When the merger of the two companies is complete, Khosla will be director and Ragavan president. Redback shareholders, who have already reacted positively to the merger announcement, will hold 62 per cent of the stock and Siara stakeholders 38 per cent. Siara was founded by former senior managers from ADC Telecommunications, Advanced Micro Devices, Ascend, Cisco, Lucent and Nortel.

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (10193)	12/22/1999 7:13:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Global receives Rs1.8 bn for group firm gtl.co.in 22-12-1999 17:14:27 Global Tele-Systems Ltd has received Rs1.8bn from a consortium of investors for the sale of its stake in group firm Global Electronic Commerce Services Ltd (GECS), the company said in a statement today. Confirming the receipt of Rs1.8bn today towards the transaction the company said the consortium of investors had subscribed to the unsecured non-convertible debentures of Global Tele-Systems, which could be redeemed for equity shares of GECS at a minimum base price within 120 days. The company had set the base price at Rs200 per share. The statement said, the company had stipulated a target price between Rs200 and Rs250 per share and valued the total transaction between Rs1.8bn and Rs2.25bn. It said the final price will be decided within 120 days after valuation by the consortium of investors. Shares of Global Tele-Systems ended Rs46 higher at 1,043 in a volume of 2.86mn shares on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Source: Reuters