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Home> Executive Track> Portraits
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| Weaving success through collaboration |
| Having done both his under-grad and graduation in operations research and business from the Columbia University in the US, Datar worked for 8½ years in the financial services industry, as a strategist at ABN AMRO, Chicago, and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he focused on analyzing companies in Latin America in the telecom space |
| Priya Padmanabhan |
| Friday, September 22, 2006 |
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| What I would like to change about myself |
Learn to be more patient |
| Hobbies |
Reading, golf, travel |
| Best moment |
The decision to come back to India |
| A Must Have |
Optimism - To look ahead |
| Passionate about |
Business and Technology |
| Worst Fears |
What do I do after this job |
| Passionate about |
Making a difference |
| Fav gizmo |
I-Pod |
| Fav destination |
Italy |
| Fav Book |
Thomas L. Friedman's A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century |
| What ticks you off |
Insincerity |
| A lesson for life |
Embrace change |
| Mote: |
Live in the moment |
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Weaving success through collaboration...
Often ground reality puts paid to the best-laid plans of people: something that Kiran Datar and a few of his friends realized when they had to shelve plans of becoming India's first telecom ISP in the mid-90s. Having done both his under-grad and graduation in operations research and business from the Columbia University in the US, Datar worked for 8½ years in the financial services industry, as a strategist at ABN AMRO, Chicago, and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he focused on analyzing companies in Latin America in the telecom space.
This is when the seed of starting a telecom company in India took root.
Looking back, Datar says, "I got exposed to the whole telecom business. It gave me some insight into working in telecom in emerging markets. Software was just starting to take off in India and my partners and I thought of setting up India's first ISP which was a big cost factor in the delivery of software."
But soon he realized that while India and Latin America may both be emerging markets, the telecom scene in India was far removed from the boom in Latin America. At that time in India, there were no private operators and no scope in the foreseeable future for private players since there was a monopoly.
Datar backed out of this scene but still sensed the potential in India and wanted to be part of the exciting growth that was bound to happen soon. Weighing his options, Datar and three others decided to focus on offering niche services in telecom-in the area of audio-conferencing.
He could have stayed back in the US and pursued a more predictable, hunky-dory path. But he had made up his mind about coming back to India.
"The fact was that we were seeing deregulation happening in a few industries in India. We wanted an early start. In the US, getting capital and starting your own company is easy. But the challenge of doing something in India was what excited us and also the soft factors like family."
Intuition told Datar that the market would soon explode in 8-10 years.
So in 1996, he started CyberBazaar in Bangalore, which did not get operational until 1998 since it took a year's time to get licenses and another 6-8 months to set the finances in place.
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| For the most part, Datar and his partners bootstrapped the company from their savings, since it was difficult to convince traditional banks to lend a loan to a start-up that "wanted to make money out of putting people on a phone call." SBI funded part of their project.
With a capital of Rs 40 lakh and four enthusiastic people, CyberBazaar got off the ground. The company was the only one in India at the time to offer audio-conferencing solutions.
Initially, it was difficult to convince people about the benefits of virtual meetings. Enterprises were slow to take up the message of productivity increase. So CybeBazaar changed its positioning to stress on the low-cost proposition.
"Instead of making multiple calls to the US and within India, they could have a bridge and save on the cost of ISD and STD calls, which were high then," says Datar. This got enterprises hooked to audio-conferencing.
The company focused mainly on the IT industry since it felt the biggest need for collaboration. By the late 90s, the web was emerging as the next platform. Datar saw the potential of the Internet that along with audio could offer a complete set of collaboration solutions.
"We knew that a combination of data exchange along with audio would be a powerful draw."
Instead of developing solutions in this area from ground-up, they decided to go with a partner-Webex, which was well-established in the web-conferencing space. In 2001, they signed a partnership and became the reseller for Webex solutions in India.
"We seeded the idea among customers and did a lot of evangelism since it was new then," says Datar.
During the dotcom bust and after, CyberBazaar actually succeeded in driving the cost-cutting proposition of its solutions to its IT customers. "We actually gave them a tool to deal with these times. It could cut down on travel expenses."
By 2003, Webex saw a lot of action in India in terms of US-based companies opening offices in India, increase in broadband adoption; and a breakdown of regulatory constraints. When the Webex CEO came to India to do a roadshow along with CyberBazaar, he got a feel of the market and also the kind of market traction that Dattar and his team had built. The company enjoyed a whopping 90 per cent market share and the Indian market had the potential to become a big part of Webex's business.
So in 2005, Webex bought over CyberBazaar for $4 million. CyberBazaar then became WebEx Communications India Pvt. Ltd with Dattar as the MD.
The company has a lot of expectations from the Indian market, which is currently among the top three markets for Webex in terms of the volume of growth. Today Datar heads a 300-people strong company spread across eight locations in India. Besides IT, the company also caters to segments like pharma and financial services.
He is confident of taking on the likes of Microsoft and others by virtue of the company's Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
Datar hopes to keep Webex's growth in-step with the growth of the Indian IT industry. "If you look at the Indian IT industry, it has set an IT export target of $60 billion by 2009. Collaboration would definitely be key part of their growth."
In his book, the World is Flat, Thomas Friedman cites collaboration as one of the factors that enabled the leveling of the global playing field. Going by this reasoning, the company that Datar will only see its growth curve going northwards.
© CyberMedia News
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