.In Is In

Indian cyberspace is never going to be the same again. After conquering Indian audiences for years from their respective homelands, the big boys of the World Wide Web have finally made their way into India. Yahoo!, the globe's largest portal, Lycos of Mailcity fame, AltaVista, one of the big boys powering search engines, and ZDNet, the virtual technology guru, have anchored in this mystique-filled land of IT dreams. If you thought it can't get any bigger than this, hold your breath! Windows maker Microsoft is nurturing its web baby msn.co.in to give a royal shove to the old kids on the block.

The early bird among them was tech portal ZDNet which put its India site in place as early as April in collaboration with Mumbai-based Jasubhai group. For this, the company has set up a joint venture and taken a 12 per cent stake in it. Company officials say 50 per cent of the content of the India venture is sourced locally. Says Shvetank Shah, chief operating officer, ZDNet India: "You can't survive in a local market if your content comes from abroad. We have set up a huge content creation facility in India because we want to be India's No 1 portal." It has forged tie-ups with Yahoo!, Rediff.com, Satyam, Channel V, Caltiger.com and cellular operator Orange to provide tech-heavy content.

Yahoo.com, the biggest player in the game, made its entry into India recently with a massive horizontal portal. Designed specially for desi web users, in.yahoo.com features an extensive web directory of English language sites apart from local programming and communication services. India is the 23rd country of operations for Yahoo! "India is a rapidly growing market and with the launch of Yahoo! India, we would play a key role in further advancing the Internet revolution in this region," says Heather Killen, senior vice-president, international operations, Yahoo! Inc., referring to International Data Corp. (idc) projections that by end-2000, India will have 1.6 million Net subscribers. Killen's site has already customised pages for 19 Indian cities, including Laloo's Patna.

True to its out-of-the-world image, Yahoo! India has tied up with a vast array of Indian companies for content in different fields. This includes afp, AP, Reuters and pti for news, indiabulls.com, Bombay Stock Exchange, indiainfoline.com and sharekhan.com for finance and quotes, cricketx.com and cricketnext.com for cricket, Cineblitz, Stardust, Hungama.com and Matrix for cinema and archiesonline.com and clubgreetings.com for greetings. It has also brought to India its popular Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Chat, including voice chat.

In a similar approach, Lycos Communications - which runs its popular horizontal portal and Mailcity e-mail server - has set up parallel operations in India as part of its massive Asia plans. "India has always been an interesting workplace for Lycos. The entire world is waiting to be here. And this is the right time to create brand loyalty," says Mary Ong, ceo, Lycos Asia. Lycos started its Asia operations in September 1999 with a tie-up with Singapore Telecom and an initial investment of $50 million. India is the sixth Asian country where it set up operations. Like others, Lycos will also provide localised content in each of its Asian websites, including India, for which the company has tied up with ciol.com and indbazaar.com. Under an arrangement with webdunia.com, Lycos will, for the first time in a global portal, offer e-mail and chat in Indian languages.

Also in the race is AltaVista, which has limited itself to an India-specific engine. Says Martin Keogh, AltaVista's business development director: "AltaVista as a company is already popular with Indians. We have a quarter of a million loyal Indian users and plan to increase this many times through our India operations." It's search engine, in.altavista.com, says it has the largest index of Indian content with over 1.25 million pages. If AltaVista's claims are true, the search engine processes 35 million enquiries of the 100 million carried out on the Internet every day.

SO WHY ARE THE GODZILLAS OF THE NET HOMING IN ON INDIA?

Why not? PC-penetration in India is increasing in top gear and the Net subscriber base has already crossed one million. Two months ago, it was just 0.75 million. The total number of Net users is touching 4 million and by March 2001 it's expected to go well over 5 million.

The future holds a lot of promise. idc predicts a user base of 7-8 million in the next three years while Goldman Sachs paints a more optimistic picture of above 50 million in the next five. An imrb survey conducted for the Manufacturing Association for Information Technology shows the PC market registered a growth of 37 per cent this year over the previous. And things could only get better.

A McKinsey-nasscom study is equally optimistic. nasscom itself has predicted 23 million Net users by 2003. Its survey, conducted in June-July 2000, says the number of Net connections would more than double every year for the next four years.

Reason enough for any serious web player to make India its foster home. Says Jonathan Epstein, executive vice-president, ZDNet International: "Where one per cent of the population is the size of the entire German Net population, we are talking of huge numbers and an enormous market. Need we think twice about India?"

Probably the same logic is driving Microsoft. It was one of the first companies to put in place an India-specific portal and has been trial-running its India site msn.co.in for several months now. Although company officials can't commit on a specific launch date, the site is likely to be up by October this year.

And it's just the beginning. Analysts say by mid-2001, all major global portals will come to India. Says a dotcom ceo: "The message is loud and clear. If you haven't entered India, you haven't happened. The days are near when India will be the operational focus for the rest of the world."

Says Epstein: "India was a glaring missing link in our portfolio. Now that we are here, our portfolio is complete. It's a sweet spot in the world IT scenario. India will be among our top five sites." Others are monitoring the growth of IT in India with eyes wide open. "The market is growing in leaps and bounds," says Keogh.

There are a few dampeners, though. Lack of bandwidth has forced all these portals to host their services in other countries. While AltaVista's India site is hosted in London, Lycos is beaming its in.lycosasia.com from its hub in Singapore and ZDNet from the US. To allow fast access from India's limited bandwidth, they have even redesigned these sites to reduce graphic content which usually takes longer to download.

And what happens to existing Indian portals with the advent of these biggies? The rediffs, the indiatimes, the satyamonlines? Indiatimes in fact is running an anti-yahoo! contest: anyone who searches for an India-related issue and finds better results from a yahoo! search than an indiatimes search is eligible for prizes (and, presumably, indiatimes then quickly plugs the gaps in its search engine). "Those with strong fundamentals and a clear business strategy need not worry. But those which popped up to gain currency will have to go," says Sunil Lulla of Microland-promoted indya. com. Others feel there would be some pressure on companies when they go back to their venture capitalists for the next tranche of cash because all eyes will now be fixed on the big boys. As a result, m&a may be the new buzzword in India's virtual economy.

The market is bursting at its seams. With the opening up of private gateways and bandwidth expansion in the offing, the market can only get even more interesting. And the presence of hunks in India's soliciting cyberspace will add spice to that.