In early 2007, Novatium was one of the most celebrated Chennai-based companies. It got featured in international media all over, won awards for being the most innovative technology company, and was touted as the small David who was taking on the Goliaths and change the face of computing in the world. It was going to bring the cost of computing down dramatically. It was known as the company that will produce the $100 PC and take it to millions of people. After the publicity blitz, the company more or less disappeared from the public mind. Nor was the country flooded by low-cost PCs. The only thing one heard was that Novatium had tied up with some telcos like MTNL and BSNL.
Novatium is the brainchild of Rajesh Jain (of indiaworld.com fame), who is the co-founder & chairman of the company. The company was launched to make Net PC and Net TV that use a normal computer monitor. The concept was to base the products on cheap cell phone chips, doing away with the hard disc drive, extensive memory and prepackaged software that add extensively to the cost of a PC. The thin client server design effectively outsources most of a PC?s typical functions to a faraway server. Jain found a partner in Ashok Jhunjhunwala, professor at IIT, Chennai, who runs a research lab and a business incubator. In 2003, Novatium was born with another partner as well, Analogue Devices chairman, Ray Stata.
After all the fanfare, nothing much seemed to be happening. There have also been a growing number of sceptics at the idea of low-cost computing. According to many in the computer industry, this whole idea is a joke and is not a workable proposition. This is an industry where Moore?s law operates, technology changes at lightning speed, micro chips get more powerful and cheaper, and everything is available on the net. There has been a global revolution in the thin server concept. Interestingly, around the same time Novatium was launched, MIT?s digital media icon, Nicholas Negroponte came up with the One Laptop per Child initiative. It retained the complex design, but attempted to cut costs, and make it child friendly. It was to be available for $100 with a lot of subsidies thrown in from the government and private sector. Last heard of, the price had gone up to $200. This has not quite taken off either.
So is it the end of a dream for Novatium? Alok Singh, CEO & MD of Novatium, is quite confident that the company is going in the right direction. He also explains that most of the action in the company started after the publicity overkill. Novatium?s client end devices have changed over the past years. The smartness factor has increased consistently over the different generations of the device. They have evolved from being server-centric devices to being managed devices that adapt to the type of network available. Today, Novatium?s Navigator and netPC suggests and makes available to users local and remote applications based on the user?s network conditions. ?We are not into low-cost computers as it was widely thought of. Our cost happens to be lower than the dominant design sold,? he says. What Singh and his colleagues are attempting to do is to make computing simple and affordable, remove the cost and complexity in computing. What is available will be around $100 for the device (the Rs 5,000 PC), $7-10 monthly fee for service. Service fee includes computing, connectivity and storage.
When one buys a PC, several decisions have to be taken on operating systems, network peripherals, Web browsers, applications, content, online services and so on. It is all so complex. According to Vinod Kumar Gopinath, chief technology officer, Novatium, their device will simplify buying decisions, focusing on the user?s objectives. ?A computer is a great device to have. But in our country it?s not a necessity yet. People still don?t understand that it?s a great device. We know it?s time to build a new concept and turn around the idea of computing. We worked with a lot of technologies to figure out what we need and where to put our efforts in. What we have come out with is not a PC replacement. We have combined the utility computing and the cloud- computing concept. Low cost is purely incidental. It is actually a PC plus,? he says.
Singh says that the company has 11 international patents. He is also aware that one cannot sell patents in the market. He says that they are trying to position their product as an appliance. When one buys a refrigerator, one does not upgrade hardware and software or worry about anti-virus. This is true when one buys TVs, DVD players or washing machines. ?Computing will be what you consume. You consume an experience, such as YouTube, from our device. Buy our device, take it home, as long as you have power and Internet connection, we give you various service options. It is like getting DTH services. The operator has to have all the channels, but the customer can choose what he wants. You don?t ever need to upgrade your device. It boots up almost instantly. It won?t slow down even after a million cycles,? he adds.
Why has it taken so long for Novatium to sell in large numbers? Right now sales have been climbing up to 4,000 a month. Singh says selling 1,00,000 devices a month is not too far away. It has taken long to scale up as the company had to put support systems for hardware in place. The ecosystem also had to fall in place. The company had to get through three major hurdles. ?Whatever innovation we had done, the customer has to value that. The product must make sense from the customer?s point of view. It also must be scalable. We have gone through these processes one by one and have emerged much stronger today,? says Singh.
Novatium has fixed the technology, got the business models right to a great extent, and is working on marketing strategy. ?By January, we would have tied up with all the telcos in the country. We may be entering into deals with other countries. We will certainly come back to the radar,? says Singh. So will the guerrilla warriors emerge winners or losers? We will know soon enough.