TATA LAUNCHES ITS ISP SERVICES IN CHENNAI

TATA Internet Services Limited, has launched the group's Internet services company, Tatanova. The company is to provide access, content, connectivity, Internet data centres and other industry-specific value-added services.

For consumers, TISL will offer Internet Access in key cities across India starting with dial-up and ISDN. This service is currently being launched in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi. TISL has partnered with Bharat Petroleum to provide Internet Centres in their Petrol outlets in key cities. The company has also created a general interest horizontal portal Tatanova.com. It is platform for information, entertainment and consumer friendly services. Apart from what has been developed internally, this portal carries portals from other Tata companies and tie ups with other suitable outside portals.

For its corporate clientele, TISL plans to provide the entire range of Internet-related services including Access, Data Centre Outsourcing, Applications Leasing (ASPs), and a platform for setting up B2B Net Market Places and associated Exchange Services. The company endeavours to provide quality customer service, to which end it has made huge investments in infrastructure with built-in redundancies to ensure a high level of uptime. The infrastructure is being built with technology leaders like Cisco, IBM and 3-com.

In the context of a mushrooming ISP scenario, with numerous regional players already on the fray and most of the portals crashing due to faulty revenue models, the CEO, of TISL, N Srinath remarked, "We are not expecting to make ad revenue or e-commerce revenue out of the portals. Currently, neither access nor portals are great money spinners. Tatanova's revenue generation will be driven by rapidly building connectivity for the customer through access and corporate business. Right now the Internet business is not a great revenue earner, but we are expecting that it will turn around some day. And we will be ready when that happens".

The Company plans to invest Rs 500 crore for setting up the necessary infrastructure. The investment is to flow in from the Tata group companies. Srinath added that they were expecting to break even by year 4 or 5.

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