Bhatia urges India to excel in IT products

Thursday, 14 July , 2005, 12:40

Bangalore: India should excel in product development to emerge as the Information Technology superpower of the world and the current model of software services will take it nowhere, Hotmail Co-Founder and evangelist Sabeer Bhatia has said.

Talking to newspersons here last night, Bhatia, who is the chief evangelist of Instacoll that aimed at developing and providing software and services to transform the internet into a personal medium, said the current two per cent share of the global IT turnover did not put the country in a proper perspective.

The technology and the manpower required were available in the country and what was required was the drive that should enable product takeover from services.

He said InstaColl aspired to be the first global 'made in India' product success story. "I am working on six new products, all in India", and one of them would be announced shortly. These products would demonstrate that India could also produce world-clbutt products, he added.

Bhatia, who was here in connection with the launch of Instabuttist, a web-based support product, offering contact centres, support organisations and help desks, an innovative and cost-effective mode to enhance customer satisfaction, said to emerge a product leader India should "eliminate the mentality of chalta hai."

Bhatia said InstaColl, an innovative contextual collaboration pioneered by him, was currently being tested out in six different locations in India, including the Aeronautical Development Agency and the BaeHal, a British Aerospace-Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, joint venture.

"The response is tremendous and we have already had thousands of hits," he said, adding that it had already started generating revenue. However, it would move further and become a fully-tested product within the next couple of months.

He planned to take it to the US where a major PR initiative would be launched soon, he informed.

Bhatia had fully funded the new company, which had come out with Instabuttist based on the experience gained from the users of InstaColl. Instabuttist was a web-based support service that used avanced communication capabilities of InstaColl and its unique data centric philosophy and peer-to-peer technology to enable agents to remotely identify, instantly resolve and comprehensively track customer issues within an online support session.

Instabuttist would be available for one-tenth the cost of a similar product and functional on a distributed computing environment as compared to a single point functional by the compebreastion, Bhatia said.

He said the new service enabled enterprises to provide a high quality personalised customer care experience similar to an onsite visit.

Bhatia said Instabuttist merged the excellent service delivery of onsite support with cost benefits of telephone support. "We have leveraged the power of InstaColl to create a highly sophisticated, yet surprisingly affordable web-based remote support service that all support organisations could gainfully employ to increase productivity and service throughput," he added.

He also announced that the company had signed up strategic alliances and partnerships with a host of global leaders, including Sun Microsystems, Ingram Microsystems and the NASA-formed Girvan Insbreastute of Technology. Girvan would enable InstaColl spread into government agencies and utilities in the US, he added.

Girvan was chartered to foster public-private partnerships between Fedral Labs and fortune companies besides private equity firms and start-up companies across the US. The partnership with Girvan indicated the relevance of InstaColl's core technology and product suite for several of its affiliate partners.