E-Governance: 26/07/09

 

3COM INDIA ARM TARGETS $25 M, BETS ON E-GOVERNANCE PROJECTS
Rachana Khanzode, Mumbai
The Financial Express

3Com, the enterprise-networking solutions provider, is betting big on the Indian market. Inspira Enterprises, the Indian arm of the $1.3-billion firm, is looking at revenues worth $25 million from India in the coming year.

Manoj Kanodia, CEO of Inspira Enterprises, said, “We expect revenues worth $25 million in the next one year and we target to reach the $1-billion mark in next five years from India alone. Besides looking at the power and telecom sectors for broadband rollout, we are looking at e-governance projects and we have already bid for some of these in the last six months.” The company also has a focus on the banking financial service & insurance (BFSI), logistics, manufacturing and SMEs.

However, the China-based company is expected to face tough competition from US-based Cisco Systems, which has been in the Indian market for a long time now.

According to Kanodia, it wouldn’t be much difficult for them to break the market. “The total cost of ownership of our products is almost 30-40 percent lower than that of our nearest competitor (Cisco) owing to lower energy usage. This, in turn, also helps in lower cooling requirements, thereby reducing the costs significantly.” The firm products have flexibility to upgrade on any system, thereby bringing future investment protection for its clients, he added.

The company provides solutions in end-to-end data centre products, network-based intrusion prevention system and network access control solutions. Peter Chai, vice president and GM of (Asia Pacific) 3Com, said, “About 15 percent of our revenues are spend for research & development (R&D). The Indian market is over $1 billion for us in the networking, switching and security space. We are also looking at mature markets like Japan, which is about $2.6 billion, and China, about $2 billion, per year.” He added that most of the deployments would be for infrastructure projects.

The company also plans to bring in IP-based video surveillance (CCTV) in India. “The CCTVs in India are analogue-based and we intend to bring IP-based CCTVs with sensors that will bring better security aspects,” said Chai.

EPFOS TO BECOME COMPUTERISED BY NOVEMBER
New Delhi
Business Standard  The Asian Age  DNA (Bangalore)  

Come November, PF claims will be settled within days as the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's (EPFO) would become fully computerised drastically reducing the time taken for the whole process.

"Employees Provident Fund Organiation would not take more than a week for claim settlement as its all 118 regional and sub-regional office would be maintaining records and settling claims using electronic mode by November this year," Commissioner Employees' Provident Fund Organisation K Chandramouli said.

"If the claim is complete in all respect, it would not even take an hour to settle a claim through e-mode. We are not amending our Employees Provident Fund Scheme 1952, Para 72(7), which mandates settling of claims with in 30 days," he added.

Chandramouli said, "We successfully ran a pilot project in Karnal Regional Sub-Office in Haryana. We would computerise all our offices in the country in phases by November this year. Initially we would computerise 25 offices."

According to an EPFO official said PF claim settlement takes about three to four months in normal course of time when applicant completes all formalities. "If there is any discrepancy then settling PF claim could be stretched for longer period."

EPFO maintains PF accounts of about 4.49 crore subscribers with an incremental deposits of around Rs 25,000 crore with a corpus of about 1.82 lakh crore.