Tags: HP, Microsoft, SharePoint, F5, WebAccelerator, Jimi Ibbett, Ryan Korock, Jeff Bellamy, Application Ready Network, ARN

What have you done? Where have you been? That’s what Meosphere wants you to tell it. Here, Founder and CEO Eric Eliason shows us the Meosphere.

Other posts from a year ago:
Keeping track of your life with Meosphere’s CEO
Collaborative design app wows at Mix
Compete’s charts Web traffic trends
Talking about tracking Web site traffic/trends with Compete

Tags: Meosphere, Eric Eliason

Tags: alltop, guy kawasaki, Jennifer Jones, Marketing Voices, social media

Brent Nixon, President of Cymphonix, shares an overview of the company and discusses some of the key issues IT managers are worried about, including the emergence of web apps that anticipate near unlimited bandwidth. Rather than pay for more bandwidth, Cymphonix lets IT managers see the top bandwidth users, top sites visited, and real-time data activity and manage and filter traffic through static and dynamic port filtering.

Tags: Bandwidth Management, Brent Nixon, Cymphonix, filtering, IP Traffic

Tags: F5, Joe Hicks, Web Acceleration, Web Accelerator, CDN

Tune in to find out what KP has to say about MSN India, their audience and the different kinds of content that they MSN India plans to roll out for their audience.
In case you missed out Part-1 of our conversation with KP, here is the link.

Tags: Bollywood, krishna prasad, MSN, msn india

Tags: Becky Ryan, Trellian

However, tools exist that not only make employees more productive on a day-to-day basis, but also can make unplanned business disruptions less, well, disruptive. In this first part Jan explains the scope of what kinds of things can happen, and how using WebEx to telework can significantly reduce the pain of these unforseen occurances.

Tags: business continuity, Jan Sysmans, WebEx

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New York City La Guardia and JFK
Long Beach
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Oakland
Orange County
Philadelphia
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San Antonio
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San Jose
Seattle
Tampa
Toronto
Vancouver
Washington, D.C. Reagan
Washington, D.C. Dulles

Sam was known in the blogosphere for the good coverage he did at TechCrunch UK. After a public split with Mike Arrington , he began Vecosys, and now BlogNation.

Sam has worked in the IT industry for over 18 years for companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Gateway Computers and CMGi, in a variety of senior technical and marketing roles. Sam has also experienced the joy and pain of running his own start-ups. Recently, Sam has been working as a freelance consultant with companies such as MSN (UK) and BT, helping develop their Web 2.0 strategies.

When not blogging, consulting or presenting, Sam loves nothing better than spending time with his wife & young family, running, drinking fine wine with his friends or watching his beloved Liverpool FC.

Oh, just a quick note to let you know that the audio quality isn’t the best. To make it easy, I have transcribed the conversation below and it will be a good supplement to the podcast.

Photo courtesy: Library House

Transcript:

Kiruba : Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Sethi: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Kiruba: Congratulations on the launch of BlogNation. That’s a very ambitious project you have started.

Sam Sethi: Yeah. It has started on a post I wrote on my own blog “Go Big or Go Home” which really was related to the fact that most Europeans were told by Americans that we don’t have enough ambition. Alright. OK. Let’s see how ambitious we can get and if we can cover most of the world’s Web 2.0 news and that’s what BlogNation will do.

Kiruba: Alright. If a person in the US were to listen to this and one of the obvious questions that would be asking is, “Are there enough innovation happening outside of the US?”. What would be your answer?

Sam Sethi: The answer would be Yes and No. Let me explain. Yes, there is a lot of innovation happening outside of the USA, outside of the Silicon Valley. Companies like Jaiku,Vimeo, get on the American radar very early. The answer, ‘I don’t know’ is because of the language barrier. Up until now, I’m trying to understand what’s happening in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Brazil, Japan, China. Its just impossible for us if we don’t know the language. BlogNation will be moving into 22 countries…there is a lot of activity in the Web 2.0 space and we’ll get to understand them better.

Kiruba: In countries like India and UK, obviously there is no problem because English is the main language but like you just said, in China, Bulgaria, Germany, a lot of blogging and coverage of technology happens in the local language. How are you going to overcome this barrier?

Sam Sethi: OK. What we have done is that BlogNation will be written in English only. We will rope in 22 very good bloggers from around the globe who live in their country, who are native speaking and who can write very good English. The idea is that they will write about what is going on in their country in English and hopefully we can use one common language on the Internet to appreciate what is going on in each country and learn quicker about the new startups rather than wait four to five months to learn about them.

Kiruba: OK. Let’s go back in history. Now, Sam Sethi as a person came into prominence for a lot of bloggers because you were with TechCrunch UK and you did some real good work. So what happened after that and how did BlogNation came into being?

Sam Sethi: OK. TechCrunch UK was really a project with myself and several friends in London who organize events to try and realize how we can make the UK start up scene much more available around the world. We started on a project called unplugged London and we realized that it would be much simpler teaming up with Mike Arrington. Post Mike Arrington and Post TechCrunch, we started a blog called Vecosys which really was a knee jerk reaction to me leaving TechCrunch.

In the three months that we wrote Vecosys we realized that its not sustainable unless you build it big. Really, we were covering too small a market and not getting any revenues in.

BlogNation was born as a project that would be built from the ground up having an advertising network. The company Index is an important feature of the site. The company Index is really a lesson learnt in blogging. If you write ten posts they would appear on the homepage but once it drops off the homepage, its gone. The Company Index of BlogNation is a link between the post and the company. Every time there is an article written, it would be added to the company Index. Basically if you look at a particular company in the Index, you can access all articles relating to the company. If there’s one or more articles about the company, you will be able to see the history of the posts. So a great way to track a particular company, read news about the past and the current. BlogNation is a professional version of what we were doing at Vecosys.

Kiruba: Alright. Now, the scale of BlogNation is quite ambitious with 20 plus countries in the plans. So how are you funding the entire project.

Sam Sethi: The project is currently self funded and angel funded. We hope that we encourage startups who haven’t advertised before. So a lot of startups I know say they haven’t advertised on Google or Yahoo or other social networking sites because the advertising is very expensive. We are looking at providing a simple targeted advertising for entrepreneurs for a very reasonable CPM rate to encourage them. The other revenues will come from larger companies who fund BlogNation. More revenues will come from other activities that we be doing which I will be talking about later.

Kiruba: Alright. When you say other activities, would events also be in your business model just like how Rafat Ali is doing.

Sam Sethi: Events is certainly in the business model. When you have got 22 editors covering news around the world covering news, you have a very strong view of whats happening around the world and what technology we feel we will be able to attract people. Today, its just in the plans.

Kiruba: BlogNation typifies a startup company. And for a lot of startup companies the biggest hurdle they face is ‘How do I make myself known to a lot of people?” which is marketing basically. So, how are you planning to take care of that?

Sam Sethi: Like any startup we need other bloggers around the world to connect to us. We need people to talk about us. We need to provide quality relevant content which makes people want to come back to us and make BlogNation their destination site throughout the day or once a week or whatever is their frequency. I don’t think there is a quick way. I think we will take six months to build a good traffic or maybe longer.

We have very good people in our team who are well connected. The combination of writing well and sponsoring and reporting events around the world, linking to people, talking about interested things. Overtime, if we are the right thing, people will come to us.

Kiruba: Awesome. Your plans for the next year. One year down the line where do you anticipate BlogNation will be?

Sam Sethi: I would hope it is the river of news homepage which is all the world stories, will become the destination choice. Our page views, we have some figures in mind, which will make us one of the top blogs in the world hopefully. Outside of that we have a couple of other plans in mind. One is to create a TechMeme for the rest of the world. Again I feel, TechMeme is a US centric blog and cover mostly the valley and when they don’t have enough to cover, they occasionally look outside. I’d like to cover everything outside of the US . And we would be supporting a community of entrepreneurs.

Kiruba: Awesome. We were talking about Sam Sethi, the business guy. Let’s talk about Sam Sethi, the person. Tell us about your personal interests other than business. I know that now BlogNation would take more of your time but in your spare time what would you like doing.

Sam Sethi: I’m a family man with two children. So, that takes care of more of the free time. I like sports, running, rugby, football . I like socializing with friends..the thing that most family people tend to do. I don’t think I’m any different.

My interest before blogging was to learn all about learning, about what new and exciting things in technology is all about. I have a technical background. So, my natural extension is get into writing about exciting companies.

Kiruba: Alright. Fantastic. Sam, here’s wishing the very best for BlogNation.

Sam Sethi: Thank you.

Kiruba: Thank you, very much.

Tags: Sam Sethi, entrepreneur, BlogNation, Web 2.0, TechCrunch UK, Mike Arrington, Vecosys

Tags: Kongregate, Jim Greer, videogame

Tags: Jim McNiel, Steve Repetti, Fifth Generation, Web 2.0 Expo, Zude

Tags: Compete.com, David Cancel

Tags: David Cancel, Compete, Web traffic

Tags: RSA 2007, F5 Networks, Lori MacVittie

Tags: Andy Beal, SEO

Transcript:
Host: Bryan House - EMC Software
Guest: Naomi Miller - EMC Software

Bryan House - EMC Software
Hello and welcome to the EMC Podcast, When Content Matters. My name is Bryan House. Today’s discussion is on transactional content management and we’ll cover our solutions and strategies that you consider to address your paper management challenges. I am joined today by my colleague, Naomi Miller. Hey! Naomi.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Hello.

Bryan House - EMC Software
So, Naomi we can start as you take a minute to introduce yourself to our audience.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. My name is Naomi Miller as Bryan mentioned. I am the Director of Product Marketing for our Transactional Content Management focus. I have been at EMC Documentum for just about six years now. Actually I have a background as a customer, where I worked at Hewlett-Packard and helped, manage and implement some of our content management strategies using Documentum. So, I have some good hands-on experience, as well as a lot of experience of Documentum.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Well, great. So, to start the discussion today, can you provide us maybe with an overview of transactional content management?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s a bit of a new terminology for those of you who followed the content management space. You could think of Transactional Content Management as kind of focused on your back office processes, those processes, which are transactional in nature and result in some sort of transaction happening in your company. These processes are often very paper heavy and are very traditionally, very manual in terms of their processes, cumbersome processes and time consuming processes. The Transactional Content Management approach that EMC Documentum takes, helps to streamline that whole process, helps to eliminate as much of the paper as possible to digitize that content, and to make that content available at the right time, in the right place, as part of that transactional process.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. So, you talk on a couple of the challenges there, maybe we should dig in a little bit more, we talk about manual processes and paper. Can we — you maybe go a little bit deeper on what some of the challenges companies face in dealing with paper in their organizations?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. Most people could probably resonate with this in terms of those processes being quite cumbersome, very inefficient and obviously they not lead to a more and more expense. The one of the challenges is that, it isn’t just paper, although that is a large part of the process, there are also electronic documents you need to deal with, sometime EDI or XML files, and the papers. So, you need a much more holistic way of how you managing that information.

Accessing the information is probably one of the biggest business challenges. So, if you are a person, as part of that process, for instance one of the processes we look at is invoice processing, very manual, cumbersome process, where accessing the right information to — and properly execute that process can be quite difficult. It causes the requirement for very a leaner process, right only one person can be working on the file at any one time that obviously elongate that process unnecessarily.

As you can imagine this can also be quite a compliance nightmare not everybody knows where the right paperwork is. You don’t always know for sure that you are looking at the right version of the supporting documentation. Perhaps one of the biggest business challenges customers face, is the ability to really respond quickly to a customer inquiry. Every company, whether you are in financial services, or in manufacturing you are looking to always improve your customer service. And when a customer calls and/or a partner, or even a supplier calls to inquire about the state of their transaction with you, to the degree and you can’t answer pretty efficiently and pretty rapidly, you are then at a disadvantage over your competition.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. So, you started such a little bit on applications or business processes where this can be applied. Can you talk a little bit more about areas within businesses that are more visible or tangible in the Transactional Content Management market?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. At a horizontal level most companies could probably recognize as I mentioned I kind of talked about these as back office processes. Your accounts payable and even your accounts receivable processes are usually very cumbersome and manual today. You could look at your legal and HR processes as well at a horizontal level. And then if you were to look into individual vertical areas, financial services probably has some of the biggest challenges in the space, you think about it essentially what financial services companies create is paper, is information, and so their processes often can be quite paper heavy, quite manual. Any individual who purchased a home could resonate with the very paper based, somewhat complex back and forth process of taking out a loan.

So, Mortgage origination, loan origination is just a prime example of where we can make that a lot of efficient. Insurance companies, we all have filed claims. Medical claims, auto-insurance claims, and so forth, the claim processing is another great target for this. Processing applications, we have examples and in government, and in education where the whole approving of an application, or the enrollment of a new student, or a new citizen in a program is also another good example.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, great. Certainly, I think we all experienced refinancing our mortgages so we all understand the paper involved in that on the end user side. So, we talked a lot about applications and some of the challenges, can you talk little about how companies can put solutions in place and what that means on the nuts and bolts side?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s important to note it may already be obvious to you that in a Transactional Content Management environment it isn’t just about the documents and the papers, it’s also about the transaction. So, one — I think really important element is the right understanding of what your transactional system is? What its requirements are? Who accesses that information? And what additional information do they need? So, there are certainly line of business, ERP, back office applications that need to be taken into consideration. There needs to be the right level of integration, so that to the degree we are managing, supporting documents as part of the transaction, when we have the right level of integration and seamlessness between those systems.

Certainly, scanning and imaging and digitizing content is not necessarily new, but typically what would happen is that would often get done at the back end of a process. So, you go through the full refinance process for instance, in a very paper rich process and then at the end when that loan is funded, organizations certainly would scan and digitize that content for archiving sake. Now, what we see is much more of a trend of moving that digitization and automation process upfront, so that you can truly see an ROI, you can really shorten the total amount of time that process takes to complete, as well as, in archive and retaining that information.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Excellent. So, can you talk about the — you just started to touch on the benefits company start to see from thinking holistically about Transactional Content Management? Can you go a little bit further into what those expected benefits might be?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. The nice thing about this area is that very often organizations can see a very tangible return on their investment. Certainly there are costs, tangible costs associated with handling paper, filing papers, storing paper, copying paper, forwarding paper and you can often add those up and there are a good deal of those costs and you can’t actually eliminate. We have got examples for instance, financial services companies with distributed locations, who can simple eliminate their FedEx cost. Often times in branch locations, you would collect the day’s paper work, put it into big red envelopes and ship it across the country or wherever you need to ship it and so definitely a cost associated with that.

The other true benefit, tangible, but maybe not as — well it is ROI associated, but can’t necessarily add up that exact cost, and that is the compliance aspect. So, you collect all the paper work, you put it into envelop, you ship it across the country, who knows what is going to happen to it, that’s a compliance risk.

So, being able to automate that information, digitize that information, retain it really starts lower your compliance rest and as we mentioned perhaps again not as added up in terms of dollar and cents, but clearly giving you competitive advantage in terms of customer responsiveness is really a very big benefit. Being able to shorten the amount of time, it takes you to make any one decision. The amount of time, you can say, in responding to your customer inquires can be priceless in terms of your competitive position on the marketplace.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. I know one of the customer case studies that really resonates with me, I think about the spaces Cincinnati Insurance and one of the things that I really like about that story is that, is all of the things that you describing here are really behind the scenes and integrated into their SAP Claims Management System. So for the end users, utilizing this as part of their SAP environment, can you talk a little more about that case study?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s a really terrific one, people can find that on our website for more detail, but essentially we put a solution in place for Cincinnati Insurances. Our claim adjustors out in this field investigating large personal and casualty insurance claim. And that’s an environment, which is very content rich, adjustors have to go out and inspect damage. They take notes, they take picture, and they have supporting documentation. In the old days they would fill out by hand long forms. They would collect their notes. They would process their pictures. They would put them into FedEx packages, and to read it four weeks later, they would get a claim put into the system.

Today that’s all done very electronically. So, they have personal scanners where they are able to digitize their content via the Web. They are able to fill out their forms online, and a claim can essentially be put into the system in a matter of days, maybe even some times hours as opposed to weeks. So, not only do they have that immediate information now available to themselves, to the home office, and to the customer, they have also eliminated a lot of those shipping charges, and a lot of the paper cost.

So, it’s really been a traffic solution and then when the information comes in electronically, as you mentioned it’s automatically connected to their SAP Claims Processing Systems and once the claim is paid out that information is all archived on EMC storage devices as well. In a Archiving environment it’s got a much lower cost than high end storage. So, they really there got a very end-to-end, all the way from capture through the business process phase and through the archiving phase.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah. It’s a great story you really get to see too when you think about a transactional process how many different types of content make up a claim in this case, or any sort of business process?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Exactly. As I mentioned it’s not just paper, it’s really about I am including paper in with your electronic content, digital photos and everything else, so that you have everything you need to complete that transaction as quickly as possible, with the most accuracy as possible, and at the least amount of cost.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Naomi, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is a great discussion.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
You are welcome. Thanks Bryan.

Bryan House - EMC Software
You are welcome and I also want to thank all our listeners for tuning into the, When Content Matters podcast series from EMC. I encourage you all to learn more about Transactional Content Management Solutions, as well as our other content management products at software.emc.com, where you can also download additional podcasts and subscribe to a number of EMC RSS podcast feed. So, I want to thank you everyone for joining us today and call better up.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: content management

Tags: Kristin Criss, Jennifer Weaver, Brett Ratner

Part one here.

Transcript:
Host: Michael Johnson - PodTech
Guest: Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks

Michael Johnson - PodTech
This is Part 2, in our discussion with F5 Networks’ Kevin Hohenbrink, talking about Data Replication, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity and how F5 Networks’ WANJet product can help?

Now, one term that’s floating out there is business impact analysis. Now, how is this important to the overall Business Continuity and the Disaster Recovery Plan?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, an enterprise to undertake a business impact analysis to map their dependencies between critical business operations and the people resources applications and physical IT assets that they rely upon. In today’s environments, business process rely on multiple integrated applications, database and storage systems and so on. So, in order to restore a business process in the event of a disruption, you have to be certain replicating and coordinating the recovery of all these dependent applications. When you’re defining RTO and RPO application by application and selectively replicating data, it could mean, you’re only going to get a partial restoration of your business process.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
One of the other terms that’s out there, Kevin, it’s the term Consolidation. Now, how does this relate to protecting sites that you’ve got, say in remote areas? A lot of businesses right now have data centers, information applications and people information out in remote centers, especially as we’re expanding across greater and greater areas with globalization. How does Consolidation work?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so data loss at remote sites is currently a huge risk exposure for most enterprise customers. Leveraging existing investment and existing data centers on recovery sites to offer Consolidation Backup Solutions from remote sites where centralized facility is critical. So, Consolidation will help ensure the backups to run regularly and very successfully. They’ve improved the manageability with their central administrators by providing visibility into remote site data center protection and potentially the ability to remotely configure and manage this protection, all with the goal of enabling their remote office to recover from the localized disaster.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, business maybe thinking about — maybe putting in some additional bandwidth to support those remote sites that we’ve been talking about or maybe improve some of the performances, some of their existing Data Replication Technologies or expand them as well. When is it important for a business with this kind of set up, to consider WAN Optimization and the products that are out there for it? What kinds of things should they look at and what’s an important consideration?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so when you’re considering a WAN Optimization Solution, an important aspect of the WANJet appliance is that F5 has already taken the time and made the investment to test the interoperability of WANJet appliances with independent software vendors, storage vendors and storage network vendors like EMC and Double-Take. We’ve gone to the trouble of creating case studies in customer reference and it can provide customer references to prove out its capabilities and of course its intended benefits to our interested customers.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay, so you have some folks that are looking at their networks. What kinds of things should they be considering in designing that network when they are looking at a Disaster Recovery Preparedness Plan?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
To achieve the desired RTO and your RPO with the greatest possible distance between the sites, enterprises are often going to design multi-site disaster recovery configurations to combine synchronous, asynchronous or even batch or schedule replication technologies. Site preparation is crucial because enterprises need locate their recovery site far enough away to escape the likeliest of local and regional threats, such as natural and man-made disasters. Synchronous Replication ensures the zero data loss because technically speaking, it does not return a right acknowledgment to their application until the data is being run to their recovery site. So, as a result, Synchronous Replication requires high-bandwidth, very low latency between the data centers in a metro area and the distance is no more than a 150kms apart.

Asynchronous on the other hand are typically deployed for long distances. With Asynchronous Replication the primary and secondary sites will be slightly out of sink and there’s some chance of data loss in the event of a disaster or a business disruption. However, applications are not forced to wait for the remote site to confirm a right acknowledgment before processing can continue and that’s the difference between those two.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, when companies are looking at the idea of data replication today, what are some main factors that are challenging folks and how can they be solved?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so some of the key network challenges are, the expanding distance between DR sites. RPOs and RTOs are decreasing and a larger volume of data is needed to be replicated and of course TCP is becoming more common for all applications. This typically results in the WAN being seriously impeded from a performance perspective for it’s replication solution. So, how we’re going to resolve this? Well, you’re not going to ask the customer to replicate lost data, that’s not going to happen. Should the customer release more bandwidth? Well, an option, but it’s not a desirable choice, as this represents — as we talked about earlier, 20-30% of cost for data replication and it’s also recurring cost monthly. Accelerating a traffic — well, this is the most cost-effective method and this is what drives a solution like WANJet. Prioritizing the data replication traffic and guaranteeing bandwidth. This is what we talked about the quality of service capability of WANJet. This protects the traffic from WAN congestion or latency concerns.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Can you tell me some of the factors, WANJets got operate in the real world too. So, what would be some factors that would affect the ability of a WANJet to accelerate that replication traffic?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so the factors you are going to need to understand are the amount of repetition in data, even at the byte level, amount of compressible capability in the data. IE text is easily compressible, images are less, so all right. Another factor is the amount of different types of traffic competing for the same bandwidth. This requires WANJet to begin enforcing bandwidth guarantees which we can significantly improve performance of the important traffic at the expense of less important traffic. As I’d alluded to you before about the quality service capability.

Then the variability of data, when traffic is highly variable, congestion levels that would otherwise bring a replication process to halt, can now be prevented using bandwidth allocation because now we’re guaranteeing the bandwidth to that replication application.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay, so tell me your company installs the WANJet appliance, what would be some measurable benefits that they could expect to see in their data replication strategy right away?

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, so F5 has several customers who have deployed WANJet with industry leading storage replication vendors like EMC, Symmetric Solution and Double-Take. Some of the measurable benefits we’ve found were — doing our testing was the customers can meet their RPOs and RTOs without upgrading bandwidth or data replication solution infrastructure and they were able to accelerate replication traffic as much anywhere from five-ten times faster. They also were able to utilize 70% to 90% less bandwidth because we guaranteed the bandwidth and we prioritized for data replication applications over non-data replication traffic. So, you were able to guarantee the bandwidth for your data replication traffic because you can do the prioritization.

You’re also able to mitigate the total effective latency, affecting the replication process. We also enable them in their networks to adopt dynamically to data replication applications needs and congestion. We’re also it was kind of cool it was that we move more of the control of RAM resources into the hands of the storage team to depend on it and typically they have never had that kind of control or visibility, and then lastly, we were able to encrypt all traffic using SSL and of course this is a optional benefit on all WANJets.

Customers found that they can reduce the cost of meeting these RPOs by using a fraction of the bandwidth to replicate the same data, we were also able to provide a comprehensive view of WAN performance matrix and bottleneck so we could tell them who are the trouble spots were and then we were able to reduce the tangible and intangible cause to troubleshooting which sort of raises a big question for people. Back to the customers don’t have to incur the cost of bringing out the storage replication vendor on site.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Well, Kevin you gave a lot of information here today. Is there a Website that folks can go to at F5 Networks or a particular place so they can go to find out little bit more about the WANJet Optimization Product.

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Sure, you’re going to go to F5’s new Website www.f5.com under products and you’ll search for WANJet and there is plenty of great white papers on the technology, white papers on our data replication, interoperability story with companies like Double-Take and EMC.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Okay, so that’s www.f5.com, look under products it will we search for WANJet.Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
That’s correct

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Alright, Kevin Hohenbrink is the Product Manager for the optimization product WANJet from F5 Networks, it’s been a fascinating conversation Kevin, and hope to continue this as well as we explore more ideas about how to really make businesses and disaster recovery and threats to business and all of that easier through these types of products and it’s been great talking with you today on the Podcast.

Kevin Hohenbrink - F5 Networks
Well, thank you very much.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Kevin Hohenbrink, F5 Networks, disaster recovery, WANJet

Tags: Michael Marcellin, Verizon Business, firewall, Verizon

CEO and co-founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani was a featured speaker at the recently concluded first TiE India entrepreneurial conference in Mumbai. We caught up with Sanjeev at the conference and spoke to him on a whole range of issue ranging from what it takes to go IPO on the Indian stock market, and what are the similarities and dissimilarities when compared to an American IPO.

Info Edge was founded in May 1995. Sanjeev and his team bootstrapped their company before they landed their first round of funding from the venture arm of ICICI. Sanjeev talks about how the environment for entrepreneurs has changed in the past 10 years, and how organizations like TiE help foster entrepreneurship.

Sanjeev also offers advice to first entrepreneurs and some of the do’s and don’ts when starting a business. Sanjeev holds a bachelors degree in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi and an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad.

Transcript:
Host: Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Guest: Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
This is Kamla Bhatt for PodTech. Today, we have Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and CEO of Info Edge (India) Ltd. Info Edge recently went IPO. It was the first Indian Internet based company that went IPO. Info Edge owns properties like Naukri.com, which is a job portal, Jeevansathi.com, a matchmaking portal, and 99 acres, a real estate portal. Welcome to the show Sanjeev.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Thank you.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Congratulations on your fantastic IPO. You are the first Indian Internet company to go IPO.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
On Indian markets.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
On Indian markets.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Rediff and Sify went earlier in 1999-2000, on NASDAQ.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What was the process for going IPO in India?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
There are a lot of similarities between IPOs in India and the US. There you have the SEC here you’ve SEBI, which is Securities and Exchange Board of India. There you have Sarbanes-Oxley, here you have Clause 49. You have investment bankers in both places. Many of the investment bankers here are also there in the US for there are Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, anybody. So, therefore, there are many similarities, but you know listeners (ph) in the US, there are a couple of differences, which I’d like to point out. The first difference is that by law in India, any Indian company — any company incorporated in India has to list in India before it lists overseas or at least, it cannot not list overseas before it list in India.

So, therefore, if you’re incorporated in India, you would IPO in India first. The second big difference is that there is no open auction process in India for IPOs. There are silos, so, for example you have two IB component of 60%. In the book-built IPO you have a retail component of 30% and a high net worth individual component of 10% and therefore, within these silos there are levels of subscription, under subscription, over subscription, and therefore allocation. The third big difference in IPOs in India versus the US is that there is no discretionary allotment of stock among institutions.

So, the banker and the company cannot decide whom to give how much allocation to. It is all pro rata, all proportioned allotment depending on how much you applied for, you will get a certain percentage of that in case the issue is over subscribed you’ll just scale back. These are three differences that I’d like to highlight, but otherwise road shows, investment bankers, process, DRHP, RHP are very similar.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What was the initial offer that you had?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, we raised about $37 million of capital. Although, the IPO was open for 4 days, we had gone in with the price band of 290 to 320.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Rs 293

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Rs 290 to Rs 320 and that Rs 320 for delivering about 19.5% of the company, we would have raised $37.5 million, which is what we did.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What is the trading at today?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, today, I don’t know, but it fluctuates between somewhere in the 500s.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
So, it doubled.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, it slightly less than doubled, yes.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What are you going to do with the money that you’ve raised?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani – Info Edge (India) Ltd.
This is more or less — we’ll stick to what we’ve committed in the prospectus. This is basically growth capital, so we’re looking at new businesses and new markets, potential acquisitions. We’re looking at consolidating our Noida operations into one premises, therefore, possibly a campus. These are some of the uses of this profit money.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
You’re not a young company. You founded your company 10 years ago, so, it took you 10 long years before you went IPO. What does it take to run a company in India?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, I think if I go back to the early days, clearly the struggle was we didn’t have enough capital. That’s different now, I mean, there is a lot more venture funding available now. There was only one or two venture capitalists maybe in India, when we started out in ’97 and the second is the — because you don’t have capital you don’t have access to good infrastructure, office infrastructure, connectivity and so on. So therefore, almost every business in India would start on a bootstrap mode, self-funded mode or your family is already in business and therefore, is able to fund you.

So, you’ve either access to capital, which is personal capital. Clearly, for ventures like ours debt was not an option, so, while India did have debt available from banks, but, the banks would basically do asset based lending, which is that you‘re buying land, building. Okay, and then they will lend you money, but they would look at your cash flows. Can you sustain the repayments? So, for startups, it is very hard to get money.

So, clearly, access to capital was one thing. I think that’s changing. I think entrepreneurship as a career choice for educated white-collar youths who are not from a family business background, whose family is not in business, it was a brave and bold decision in the ‘90s. I think that is changing because there are enough success stories now. I think the presence of an entrepreneurial network like TiE, mentoring, meeting other people, I think that is a big help. We had nobody. So, it took a lot of bootstrapping when actually — while we started Naukri in 1997 — I have been an entrepreneur since 1990, and the first 10 years we struggled. Then, finally, we got venture capital from ICICI venture in early 2000.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What was the first venture you started?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
The company was still the same, it was Info Edge and it was in various avatars. First there was a partnership, then there was proprietorship and finally, there was a private limited company in which we launch Naukri. We were doing salary surveys, databases; we were basically selling information — ideas, whatever came over, we were struggling, we were running out of servant quarter after paying 800 rupees rent. We had one employee, then two employees, finally we had nine employees when we launched Naukri. So, there was 10 years of sort of struggle out servant quarters.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
So, the inspiration for Naukri, which is a jobs portal, I am assuming came out of the online job portals in the US?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well actually, no. I didn’t visit any online job portal on the Internet till about two years after we launched Naukri. This was an idea, which came to me when — in 1990 I was working in a company, early in 1990 late 1989, which is now called GlaxoSmithKline. I would observe my colleagues — we were sitting in a hall and I’d observe my colleagues would always look at appointment ads in business magazines before reading the rest of the magazine and then they would discuss.

So, I came to the conclusion that jobs are a high interest category of information and the next thing I noticed was that every week five or six headhunters would call and try and hit at one or the other of my colleagues. These jobs were never advertised and they were different headhunters each time with a different job. I figured there’s a whole fragmented database of jobs out there, which is not advertised and jobs are a high interest category of information.

So, if somebody would compile a database of jobs, keep it live and current and a national kind of archive, which is current, it would be a very powerful product. The only thing I didn’t know was how to implement it because there was no Internet that time. So, when the Internet came in ’95 in India and I saw it the first time in ’96 is when I revived this idea and I said look we can do this. So, the initial sort of Website we launched in March ’97, was something which was pure job listings. There was no resume database, so, we didn’t have the benefit of looking at other job sites around the world otherwise, we’d have launched with a much wider range of products, initially.

So, that’s how the idea came out. Of course, we evolved as we looked at competition, we looked at customers, we’d began to speak to people, we saw what’s happening. So, now it’s a very different product, but initially, it was an idea we just got by observing job seekers.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
What is the status of the job market today? What percentage of the classifieds does Naukri have?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
You know, market share figures are — there is no sort of industry documentation. Market share figures are therefore are hard to come by, but if you look at online classifieds and you look at data like comScore or Alexa, on traffic share if you define the market as consisting of Naukri, Monster Plus Jobs and TimesJobs. You define traffic as total page use. According to comScore, we’re somewhere in the 50%-ish range, 54%-55% and according to Alexa, we’re in the 60’s. So, this is the kind of percentage we have. So, we’re definitely clear leaders with higher than 50% market share.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
You’re also running AdSense on your Websites?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
We’re running AdSense on our Websites.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
So, that’s also a big revenue.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, I won’t say it’s big revenue, but it is good revenue. It’s passive revenue, it doesn’t require sales force and therefore it’s very good margin revenue.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
How has your company changed the online jobs market, the matchmaking and the real estate market, because all three are in many ways fragmented, they share a lot of characteristics in common?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, see on the online jobs, obviously, we’re clear pioneers and leaders in India, on matrimonials, we are the Number 3 player, also we started early in ’98, but this is a company we acquired in 2004, so, Jeevansathi started in ’98. We had a minority shareholding from 2000 to 2004 and then in 2004 we bought it from the other partners and began to run it ourselves. We’re Number 3 there. So, clearly, you know, but we’re catching up and it’ll be hopefully in the next — we’ll have some good news to report in the next 12 to 18 months on Jeevansathi. As far as real estate is concerned, see nobody did anything significant on real estate, right from the midst down. There were no prior players prior to the met down who succeeded.

So, this is a huge empty space and when we looked at the amount of money being spent in print media, on television, on radio, on outdoor in promoting real estate project, we figured there was a better way of doing this and if we did something on the Internet we’d be able to get some share of that ads spend (ph) and that’s what the target is. Having said that, it’s a bit early, it’s very new. Right now what we’ve is proof of concept, we’ve got a few clients, we’ve got traffic, we’ve got people getting – getting enquiries and leads. So, that’s happened and that’s good news, but it’s still a long way away from being called a large category on the Internet.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Final question is, what advise would you give to young entrepreneurs today who have stars in their eyes and are looking for — because there are many VCs who are out here? There’s a lot of money chasing very few ideas that’s something that I keep repeating.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, a few things. First is, get some experience first. While there have been a lot of success stories of people who succeeded in businesses without working anywhere else, my recommendation is get some experience. It’s a good idea to have good reality check before you start a venture of your own because it’s kind of harder to lead large team, in the organization scales unless you‘ve had some experience from being at the bottom of the organization. Second is, start businesses in those areas where you’ve domain expertise. The third is, don’t just copy an idea either from the US or from anybody else in India; be different.

Ultimately, it’s the differentiated ideas that will succeed and become big. Being different also enables you to sort of learn early and to make mistakes when it’s cheap to make mistakes before competition comes in and that’s what helped us also, because we launched in ’97 and there was no competition. First competitor came in 2000, by that time we’d learned the business. Competition took a lot longer to learn.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
But today, though you may not have that luxury of learning the business because things are evolving so fast, so, what do you do?

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Well, that’s not true, actually, if you’re focused on the customer and you know your customers really well and you know what his real needs are. You’ve got to base your business proposition, your value proposition, on some deep customer insight. You’ve got to solve the problem that is currently not being solved or in a method that it’s not being solved and it will take, possibly years for competition to get that insight. So, build your business around focused customer insights.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
Thank you so much for your time.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani - Info Edge (India) Ltd.
Thank you.

Kamla Bhatt - IndiaTech
You were listening to Sanjeev Bikhchandani Co-Founder and CEO of Info Edge. This interview was recorded at the TiE conference in Mumbai, on December 18th, 2006. This is Kamla Bhatt for PodTech and as always, thank you for tuning in.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Info Edge, Naukri, 99 acres, Jeevansathi, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, ICICI, entrepreneurs

No word on how and when the company intends to make money, and with social bookmarking still nascent, Yahoo better start giving del.icio.us a bigger push. The measurement question is a whole other issue that deserves some real debate as Mike Arrington and Matt Marshall have initiated. Until Alexa, Comscore, and friends can figure that out I expect that we’ll continue to see conflicting stats.

Watch Video | Download Video

Mike Fridgen of briefly introduces the airline fare prediction site to the audience at Gnomedex, and provides interesting statistics and anecdotes on how Farecast benefited from the blogging and social media community. Fridgen discusses how Techcrunch, Digg, John Batelle’s blog, and Boingboing drove user traffic and attention to Farecast’s website, and raised awareness of Farecast’s efforts among traditional media circles such as The New York Times and Fox News.

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San Francisco, CA March 6, 2006 (PodTech News) — Amazon.com is reportedly creating a movie and television download service. Reuters, which relied on an unidentified source, says the online bookseller is negotiating with a number of Hollywood studios to partner in the venture. Apple is also reportedly ready to offer movie downloads.

Amazon is one of a handful of Internet-based firms which have been identified as possible candidates to deliver video content. Some experts believe that a few retail businesses are facets of platforms that companies have created. Amazon and Ebay can do much more than sell books or conduct auctions. They can handle VoIP traffic, media distribution and even on-demand enterprise software services.

Movie downloading has been problematic for users and for Hollywood. Movielink, a download service partly owned by Hollywood studios, has not been as successful as envisioned. The bandwidth and costs have limited the popularity of movie downloading. The video rental business has been influenced heavily by rent-by-mail NetFlix, which has been reluctant to move into online distribution. Still, NetFlix has been studying the movie download business.

Amazon could become a strong player. It already provides movie information over its IMDB.com website. Industry observers say it would be a natural extension for the bookseller to offer downloads of movies on IMDB. A deal with movie studios and television program providers is expected soon.

Multimedia search is one of those things that not alot of people are talking about but is a big deal. As we move into Web 2.0 and soon to be 3.0, the media format of choice will move from text to audio and video. Today most of the search engines don’t do a great job on searching multimedia. Yahoo is moving to change the landscape of multimedia search.

Full Transcript: Here is a link to the full transcript of the interview.

Highlights:

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: ….broadband subscribers now outpacing dial up subscribers. It is happening globally as well. So whether you look at Europe or Asia, broadband as an infrastructure has certainly grown, so I think you’ve seen that as a key influencer in terms of how people consume this (multimedia). And you’ve seen this with the amount of content coming online; not just video and audio, but images as well. So folks are consuming more and more of this (multimedia) on a daily basis. The second piece that has happened from a product perspective is the production costs and the barriers to entry have dramatically lowered. So as folks, weather they look at using consumer tools, editing tools, putting content online and using the internet as a distribution vehicle, has become fairly robust and easy to do. It has opened up a huge distribution channel for multimedia.

John Furrier, Founder of PodTech: New formats are coming in; you mentioned broadband and the ease of publishing. How are you guys handling that and from a product perspective

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: …Part of it was to align with our vision in search, which is to enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. Part of that was to look at the vertical applications. We looked at the query logs and we looked at what the users were doing. We found that whether it was video, audio, or an image, there were a lot of folks that were doing that type of search. What we have recently done is we have started to introduce more discovery. So we do try to help you discover what is on the video Internet at any one time.

What we have also done outside of the front pages or the homepages with video search recently, is on the search results page. So we just recently launched two different views we have the grid view which is the normal key frame view so I can quickly scan the thumbnails and see what the video is out there. We also have a list view now that shows you any additional metadata that is associated with that particular piece of video. We also allow you to filter and say “Show me more from this particular site.” So it allows you to keep discovering. So we are helping from the expansion perspective to say, “I’m consuming, I’m discovering, let me help others consume and discover as well because a recommendation has a level of trust with my community.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: Is tagging an open source search algorithm? Think about open source development, people will just chip in on projects but one little tag adds to the overall thing. It’s like open source search. You guys are pioneering that, right? Talk about that.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: Yes, I think that it also puts search in the hands of the user. You know the statement, “The tyranny of the webmaster” right? I think tagging gets you around that because the users become much more involved in terms of their search experience. One of the key areas with that is with the community and the ability for users to share that and rate that and to use each other for trust and for relevance. I think from a tagging perspective that really opens it up for the users to do that. We are very excited about that particular element. So between the traditional automated ways of getting metadata, but also the new ways of getting metadata through tagging, that experience in combination really delivers that right discovery experience for users.

One example of the integrated experience for us is the recent release of our audio search product so it’s audio.search.yahoo.com we released it in August. There were three components to that experience. We’ve got music related queries and content, there’s other audio, so sound effects that type of thing, and then we also have podcasting. So between those three things we give the user and we’ve got over 50 million audio files in the index so through partners and through web crawling we really have a comprehensive and open index for folks to discover what is out there on the audio internet. What we’ve done in the results set is to integrate. … We want to hide the complexity of the back end, from the user. Where the user experience is simple, easy, and open. But the back end, whether it is the processing, the relevance, the search, the discoverability, all of those heavy lifting things we do ourselves.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: So talk about how multimedia search is changing traditional search.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: I think that is a really good question because you could just say let’s just make the multimedia experience part of the web experience and just create this unified search. From our perspective, users do consume multimedia differently. They do go to multimedia search for different purposes and they do expect a different experience from multimedia search. From our perspective, that is why we broke them out into separate vertical searches and are working to deliver those specific experiences for users and publishers to get the content into the system to get the users to come there and to start consuming and to get more engaged with that work flow and that user base and that discovery mechanism which is different from web. However, if you come for video search, image search, or audio search, certainly we like you to stay for web search. That is a big core competency of Yahoo and we are very proud of web search and so we use those vertical searches as a way to drag traffic that direction.

John Furrier, Founder PodTech: Talk about some of the highlights in your mind from a product…you must be proud of some of the stuff that you guys have done.

Jeff Karnes, Yahoo’s Director of Multimedia Search: I’m proud of video search. The amount of progress we’ve been able to make coming out of beta, coming in beta in December, we launched in general availability back in April. The amount of partners, the amount of web content we’ve been able to get into the system, our launch of Media RSS as a way for the average consumer to send and syndicate content into our index. We are in fifteen different countries, translated into six different languages. We recently launched a new search results page that ties together finding more from a particular site, integrating with My web, and also to help that discovery mechanism. I’m proud of that release and the way that we’ve been able to take something that was new to the market in terms of this new market in December and really drive a lot of features, a lot of functions, and we’ve received a tremendous amount of positive user feedback on that. The second piece is on audio search and our ability to put that product together at a time when podcasting, along with music and other audio, were really starting to converge into a single experience. And for us to deliver that experience in the way that we did it from the user experience I was very proud of the team in terms of the way they were able to do that in a relatively short amount of time.

I think you will continue to see us align with the core search vision which is enabling people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge and share and expand.