New Delhi: Hughes Escorts Communications Limited, (HECL), the leading VSAT service and Wide Area Network provider, is readying major diversification plans for the coming months. Moving from its core business of providing VSAT services to CUGs (closed user groups) HECL now aims to provide a slew of services right from Internet and application services to Net-based distance learning. On a estimated investment of over Rs 90 crore by the end of the year 2001, HECL is aiming to garner revenues of around Rs 50 crore. "We are looking at a growth of around 50 per cent in the coming year from these new service-oriented measures," said HECL, chief operating officer, Mr Partho Banerjee at a press meet in New Delhi. As part of its Internet-based education initiative, HECL is planning to set up a four classrooms in the four metros, with 20 students each in the next two months. By the end of the year, the company aims to have over classrooms at over 70 new locations. Focussing largely on management education, engineering, computers and IT and coaching and tutorials, the company plans to have over 500 such class rooms in the next 3 years under the brandname, DirecLearn. Said Mr Amit Tripathi, vice-president, interactive distance learning: "This market is worth at least half a billion dollars right now, and has the potential to grow to $5 billion in five years time. To provide quality faculty, we are in advance stage discussions with top level engineering and management institutes and foreign universities." He however, declined to divulge more details. To enable the ISP and ASP initiatives, HECL has entered into a series of strategic agreements. The first agreement is with the global ASP, Intelligroup Asia Ltd, to provide needs analysis and system integration services under the HECL's SpaceWeb banner. As per the company's strategy, the ASP services will then be made available on a sharable and rented model to existing and potential customers. "We have developed a model of avertically integrated ASP and will host application platforms under the initiative of SpaceWeb at our data centre in Gurgaon," said HECL president and managing director, Mr Shashi Ullal. The hub station is also based at the same premises in Gurgaon. To position itself as the first broadband Internet service provider with a nationwide footprint on the first day of the launch, HECL has tied up with 11 ISPs. These would provide terrestrial Internet access from 36 locations in India. The agreement is a strategic move by HECL and will enable it to kick off its OneConnect Service. In addition, to the Class A ISP service providers, HECL has signed agreements with state ISPs, who have a comprehensive coverage of towns and cities within their states.
The company is also planning to launch its portal and is planning to tie-up with content partners for content provision. For conducting business transactions, all OneConnect links may be upgraded to an VPDN-enabled SecureDial network. HECL's data centre is itself co-located with the HECL hub and may be used by customers for Web-hosting and co-location service in a secure environment. Additionally, HECL is gearing up for introducing the DirecPC platform for broadband connectivity over the next few months."
Initially, the company is planning to launch the DirecPC at prices comparable to PCs.
HECL, which is the Indian operation of US based-Hughes Network Systems, also plans to launch new products and services in India using the Ku-band frequencies.
Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
