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Indra receives $ 1 m from Intel

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DQW Bureau
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Indra Networks Inc, a new wave IT company established by Anupam Bhide and Monish Shah in September 2000, has received a funding of $ 1 million from an independent investor Vikram Modak and Intel Capital. The investment will be pumped in to expand the company's research and development capabilities into developing a box to front-end Web servers that will speed up the response time of busy websites.

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Company has its principal office in Santa Clara and a wholly owned subsidiary, Indra Networks Private Ltd in Pune. This center will be responsible for product development.

Vikram Modak, who spent 15 years at Intel, pointed out that very few Indian companies have technical products satisfying global standards. Along with Intel Capital--the strategic investment arm of Intel, Modak has invested $ 1 million into the company.

With the Internet traffic growing continuously, popular websites find it difficult, to keep up with the traffic. Response time therefore gets slower resulting in the purchase of more and more servers, the administration of which is pretty expensive. It is precisely this that Indra aims to target. 

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The company is developing 'Web Accelerator'--a special purpose device that can supplement the servers. Since these are designed for a single purpose, they are more efficient to do the work 20 times faster that a typical Web server. A new chip currently under development at Indra should be able to stack Web servers accelerated by a single web accelerator.

The potential customers for this product that will be ready by the end of the year are web-based e-mail providers such as Hotmail or Yahoo, search engines such as Google, Alta Vista and Excite. B2B, B2C and C2c sites including Amazon and eBay and Web hosting ISPs of the likes of Exodus and Digex besides Fortune 500 companies' own websites. 

Monish Shah, CTO, Indra Networks believed that the product would find a good response in the US. Anupam Bhide, CEO, Indra Networks said that this funding would see them through for the next 18 months after which they would explore the possibilities of a second round of VC funding.

The company has projected revenues to the tune of $ 50 million in the year 2001 that would jump to $ 750 million in the year 2004. On a market share of 20 per cent the company has projected revenues to the tune of $ 10 million that could go upto $ 150 million in the year 2001.

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