WEB DEVELOPMENT AND MULTIMEDIA

Shobha Ponnappa, Avigna Technologies Private Limited speaks on web development and the multimedia industry today. One of India's leading web solutions companies, Avigna is a USD $2 million company that has been consistently delivering benchmarking end-to-end e-services for corporates.

I cannot speak on behalf of every body in my industry, as each person's assessment of the situation varies. But from my own perspective, Chennai has

Strengths - Extremely high quality manpower that is very much sharper intellectually, less attrition-minded and generally more stability-oriented, provided the work climate offered to them is happy, encouraging and generally progressive. A Chennai student coming into IT is quicker on the uptake, more loyal and quite talented, although his or her projection skills may not be that impressive. In other words, appearances are deceptive, and hence many a person who may be easily discounted because of poor communication skills, may hide very deep talent and ability intellectually. A Chennai employee also appears relatively less interested in moving from company to company unnecessarily in search of more and more money. He or she appears to balance monetary interests with job satisfaction and stability better than similar candidates from some of the other cities. This could be due to our general culture that prefers stability over haphazard movement or frequent change in the illusion of greener pastures.

Weaknesses (But providing an Opportunity) - Chennai IT services are not distinctly defined in any particular area. Like most other cities we are, in my opinion, saying we too can do everything in IT. However, it is important to be seen as generally all-rounded, but having some niche speciality, or to create a center of excellence in some particular field of specialisation. For example, Switzerland is renowned for micro-accuracy in watches, Germany is renowned for auto engineering … within IT it could be valuable for Chennai to locate a sphere of extreme strength, because this will drive more business from the world to Chennai by removing competition to an extent from other cities.

Another Opportunity - To set up Chennai as the IT academics capital of India. If we are able to bring together the best of training facilites, small and large under a "one-quality-one-price" umbrella, and again create some niche specialization here also is an opportunity.

More or less on par with the rest. No particular differences.

We have a strong film, music, entertainment and TV industry in Chennai. Bandwidth availability may be able to give us that niche specialization in enriched web content development area.

As good as anyone else.

The model is getting better and better. What we have achieved now is going by the name of e-CRM! We managed to have it going three years ago! We have identified another two or three exclusive areas of web development where customers may benefit by our managing their projects online. These are part of our confidential armoury, but to answer the question, our model is proving to be very scalable and we are pleased with that.

Quality and quantity is there. But "consistency" in quality and quantity across different training establishments is lacking. We need to evolve a common standard at least!

We are not sure. But globally the online advertising model is a crashing failure. We do not expect to see much movement in that direction.

The more important question for us in Chennai - or even in India - is that we do not even have a critical mass of sufficient numbers of connected users to whom we could sell products online. The question of online security is important, but it is not that people are afraid of online security and therefore shopping sparsely from the Net. On the contrary, it is because there are too few online shoppers that security issues are not getting due importance. Where there is mass following, services will be created, get better and even multiply. First let's get more users onto the Internet in our country... and then find ways to serve them better and better.

Firstly, we at Avigna do not want to perceive ourselves as local or even regional players. It is a borderless world, and you get limited only by your own perception of it! We have always believed that while our Production Plant is in Chennai, our Headquarters is our website! Regarding trends in the Internet/multimedia industry, we think devices are going to get smaller, while bandwidths grow larger … meaning the challenge for companies like us is to be idea rich in a world where physical real estate on-screen will be less, but more transactional and communication power can be packed into it! The breakthrough opportunity lies in the way we can manage to produce killer applications that deliver drama and personal power through fewer pixels!

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