Unistal launches subsidiary global company, remote data centers 

Unistal Systems Pvt Ltd is going global in a major way. The company is coming
up with a subsidiary company--International Datacare--to handle its global
clients. Though the remote date center is semi-operational, Alok Gupta, CEO,
Unistal informed in an exclusive chat with CNS that the inauguration is
scheduled for August 15.

International Datacare is headquartered in Dubai and is headed by Pankaj
Mathur. Its data recovery software has already been translated into Greek and
Latin, and more translations would be coming up on an ad hoc basis.

Already having clients from some 27 major countries globally, Unistal under
the International Datacare umbrella, is all set to come up with data recovery
centers in Netherlands, London, South Africa, Florida and New York. Unistal is
also working on the concept of data recovery via the Internet. The technology is
in place and the infrastructure is being laid out. "One major problem we
were facing was clients not willing to ship components all the way across to
Delhi. What all a prospect has to do now is log on to the Internet, where a
complimentary analysis is run, again through the Net, and a extent of damage and
the recovery details are provided in real time. Complete backing for this
service will be provided by Unistal both technically and commercially,"
elaborated Mathur.

"In the course of doing a feasibility study we found out that Ontrack, a
US company was charging $ 500 just for analyzing the extent of damage, and
coming up with a recovery package and subsequent price estimates. We are
offering analysis as well as recovery at a far cheaper rate," added Gupta.

Back in India, the data recovery market has been pegged at Rs 10 crore by an
internal study done by Unistal, considerably higher than the anti-virus market.
"That is the reason why we are launching contact centers in 109 cities, in
addition to our channels," said Gupta. "We had trained executives in
12 cities nationally. In our new penetration spree, some 25 data recovery
centers have been made functional in the past 40 days, all over India, and the
number should be at least 100 by September. This is in addition to our vendors,
who have the option of going in for a data recovery center as well. With the
opening up of these remote data centers, only two to five percent of the data
recovery instances are expected to come to the head office in Delhi, the rest
could be tackled on-site."

He said, "The response from the first phase--June 20 to July 23--has
been tremendous. Right now, on an average we handle some 130 data recovery
instances every month. And the numbers are steadily increasing following our
free analysis, and no-recovery, no-money policy." An interesting thing to
note is that recovery charges, which could start from a basic Rs 1,500 to Rs
10,000 depending on the product range, is based on the corruption and not on the
volume of data.

Data recovery services are provided for almost all operating systems
including DOS, Windows 9X, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Win XP, RAID
servers, UNIX, LINUX, Novell NetWare, OS2 and Macintosh. Unistal claims to have
the necessary expertise in recovering data from all types of hard disks,
floppies, zip/jazz disks, DAT cartridges, tape cartridges, thumb drives and
flash cards.

Sudarshana Banerjee 

(CNS)