By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: How active is this market segment comprising Netmagic-type cloud services in India? Are there a lot of startups coming up in that cloud segment? SB: No, no. Data centers have large startup costs, and there is a [high] barrier to entry. So, I don’t see that
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: You are saying that in terms of the Indian market, customers want local support network and vendors to have retail offices [in India]. SB: Yes. Netmagic is located in India, and that offers a face which people can see and relate to. I would say this is
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: I would like to pursue the pricing aspect. Let’s say you are using SurveyMonkey in your organization and want all of your client service representatives to use SurveyMonkey and have access to or accounts in SurveyMonkey to be able to view their sets of customers and
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What percentage of books today are being sold by Amazon and online retailers? PW: I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but I know that it more than tripled in a year in terms of our share. Well, we have a very small
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Interesting! Assembling your own books – how are you doing that? What is the workflow for a teacher to assembling his or her own book? PW: This for us is very new. What we do is have a consultant come in and work with teachers to
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: I see. That actually gives me a good segway into one of the most important discussions in your industry today, or at least the way the greater technology world hears about your industry, which is the movement of textbooks to e-books and the rise of the
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What is your perspective on what Google is doing with Google Docs and Google Apps? PW: Well, for a lot of these kinds of applications is the same thing with the similar applications for the iPad. Our problem, or I guess our challenge, is compatibility. It
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Well, sounds like it makes perfect financial sense that a private cloud is going to be more cost effective than an environment where there is a lot of duplication, no virtualization, and all of that. I know the financial answer to this question, but the question