What do you expect to achieve by re-grouping enterprise computing sales organisation?
Nobody knows how business will unfold in an electronically-wired world, but our re-grouping will give us a consolidated critical view that is needed. Thus, enterprise computing, sales and delivery organisation, software sales, consulting and financing have all been put under one umbrella. The Enterprise Computing Sales Organisation will facilitate the viewpoint of looking at the customer in a holistic senseas we felt it was absolutely critical to be a serious player in this new e-business world. Forging joint relationships with partners who share our e-services vision will be the main goal of this wing. The new thinking of holding partnership-like discussions and moving the entire e-services concept forward required presence of a broader organisation like ECSO.

What kind of business structure and companies are you looking at? Will HP go in for acquisition of e-commerce firms, or enter joint ventures to achieve the goal?
As we want to act with a lot of speed, we have decided to enter strategic alliances within the next six months. Business structures are becoming less important nowadays, the speed and agility are going to be critical in the e-world. If we start focussing on structures, it will slow us down.We intend to have tie-ups with at least three financial services firms, five software development companies, three internet service providers and two consumer appliance manufacturing majors. A teamfrom the the US is currently here and preliminary discussions have already been held with 18 companies. We are also talking to two government agencies for starting joint programmes to further popularise and integrate our e-services standard e-Speak and middleware technologies Chai and WebQos with the leading appliance manufacturers.

To begin with, we will select five large software companies and do some technology or knowledge transfer, building the capability within their organisation to make use of some of this middleware and ultimately add value to their customer. Companies that see their future coming out of a digital economy, have a global reach and access out of India. We will also work with trade bodies and business experts who can act as catalysts leading to a faster roll-out of an e-enabled society in the next chapter of internet.Besides consulting, you have identified financing as an intrinsic function of ECSO.

Does it mean you will act an angel investor also?

Enterprise AccountingOrganisation too provided lease financing option, but the thrust here is very different, very holistic. We can do asset-financing for such companies. HP worldwide does asset financing worth $4 billion. This is for those start-up companies which have the vision and a great idea, but lack the finances, or even those established players who for example want to build a portal of the future making use of e-Speak, but are not sure about the return on investment. After all, there is a big risk associated with the business model as it might not have been tried before, besides the technology risk. So if that acts as a major stumbling block, we will move with them. We will build in a concept of `risk and reward', share the risk and if the upside turns out to be bigger than usual, then share the reward too. ECSO will even be open to creating a utility lab for selected customers and projects. Instead of paying up-front money, they can give us a portion of the fee and the remaining can be collected as part of thetransaction cost. So if the transaction cost goes up, we will make more money. Hence both companies will put more skin in the game.

What will a software company achieve by aligning itself with your e-Speak standard?
We have a mind-boggling software development industry in India. It has tremendous capability and potential to go up the value chain. This is the time to do it as the world of e-services is just emerging. At a future point, you will need software capability to create the kind of products that will be required for a internet-led economy. They have the capability to start adding value in this new world straightaway, in a very strategic way. Of course, we are not saying only they will gain, we too stand to gain. As a technology, e-Speak comes free as it is a open code. But we want to build a global brand equity as a leader in e-services. The higher the number of partnerships the better it will be for us to achieve that vision.