Indian telcos are early technology adopters

Compared to Indian IT companies, which are slow to capitalize on innovative
technology, the country's telecom companies like Reliance, Bharti and Tata are
early adopters of technology, said Promod Haque, Mana-ging Partner, Norwest
Ven-ture Partners' (NVP). He said that unlike th-eir US counter-parts, Indian
telcos were keen to inno-vate, since th-ey don't have to deal with legacy
syste-ms and com-plicated cost structure.

Haque, who is leading a group of NVP's port-folio companies to help them
strike partnerships with Indian clients, said, "The center of gravity of
technology is shifting to India and China. Over the last nine months, we haven't
funded a com-pany that doesn't have a development center in India. This seems
to be the trend going for-ward." The portfolio companies include
specialized firms like Virtela, Airespace, Veraz Net-works, Amberpoint, Cast
Iron Systems, Collabnet and SPSS.

Explaining the rationale behind NVP's 'Avenues' program, which is a
platform for sharing new technologies with Indian companies, Haque said, "NVP
is providing its portfolio companies contacts and the networ-king required to
penetrate the Indian market. We have show-cased seven co-mpanies that are
relevant to the Indian con-text. The challe-nge for them now is to prove their
model by translating their services into revenues and relationships."

He added th-at the delega-tion's interactions with SIs and telcos in Mumbai
had borne fruit. "They have already signed on RFPs with some companies.
Even the government sector and ministries like the railways have approached us
on Web technologies," he informed.

NVP partner, Vab Goel urged CIOs not to treat technology as an expense, but
to use it to get ahead of competition.

CyberMedia News

Mumbai