The old boy network has done it again. Allindia.com Pvt Ltd, claimed to be India’s first Internet company debuting in 1996, which runs the batchmates.com and companymates.com portals, is gearing up for new features and new business plans. It has been a frontrunner in the dot.com race, but will its luck hold?

After college, Abhishek and nothing much to do apart from Net-surfing. His parents, like most others, resents this "sheer waste of time". But ironically in the long run, Abhishek’s fortunes came through the Net. Through the community site of batchmates.com, Abhishek located his long-lost schoolmates Ajit, now settled in Canada, for help for his family’s export-import business. Ajit obliged quite readily. "That was the beginning two years ago and since then the business relationship has grown close, Abhishek recalls.

"Abhishek is one of hundreds of similar cases," says Sandeep Todi, the 31-year-old Chief executive officer (CEO) of Allindia.com. His batchmates.com has recently won top honours as a community portal at the CHIP-Dishnet DSL Web Awards 2000. Of the 1,000 contestants in the fray, with numberless Indian portals growing all the time, batchmates.com has been the unanimous choice as the best in the "special interest" and "hobbies" category by both the panel of judges and the public. In the Net media, multilingual and the search engine category, however, the top award went to Rediff.com, one of India’s most popular horizontal portals.

Launched in 1998, batchmates.com, according to Todi, is designed as a global community of alumni, "a portal that gets one back in touch with one’s old friends from school and college". For individuals, it offers a complete package to strengthen their relationship with their cronies through a variety of methods, namely, bulletin board services, e-mail facility, own buddy list, various mailers and so on. Todi claims that in these two years, batchmates.com has emerged as the country’s largest community site with a membership base exceeding 2.7 lakhs. "Very soon we will raise this to one million plus," he exult. There are already 157 countries and over 21,000 schools and colleges the world over in the batchmates.com fold. And these numbers are poised to grow fast.

Allindia.com is now planning a further value addition, desiring to add on new features that include facilities created for Web reunions, discussion forums and other such novelties. For the long term, Todi’s focus will be on generating more business. "In business, one is always in quest of contacts and if that can be re-established amongst old buddies, the trust levels will run much higher," he explains.

Todi and his team have already loaded their portal with interesting features through a couple of strategic alliances. In July last year, Allindia.com tied up with firstandsecond.com, a Delhi-based book agency with 1.5 million titles in its possession. "This will be an extra feature, offering our members the special advantage to get the right book of his or her choice," one senior executive of the company observes. Based on its huge database, batchmates.com has actually developed catalogues separately for books on different subjects like medicine, accountancy, law, history and so on. A batchmates.com member can now access any one of them and order online for any of the titles, the executive explains.

In another strategic alliance with moneycontrol.com of Mumbai, a business and personal finance portal, batchmates.com has devised a way to offer its members customized business and financial news. "This will come in extremely handy for hundreds of our young members who are setting up their own businesses," the executive points out.

Allindia.com’s another popular website is companymates.com. "This is a sequel to batchmates.com," Todi says. Unlike batchmates.com which deals with academia and helps connect longlost school and college friends, companymates.com caters to the corporate fraternity and re-unites ex-colleagues worldwide. The membership base has already touched 30,000 and is growing rapidly. "The average age of members varies between 28 and 35, covering largely the young and peripatetic professional executives."

In 1999-2000, Allindia.com recorded a turnover of Rs 1 crore, not much considering that the company is the oldest dot.com venture in India. But Todi is confident of achieving a 700 per cent growth in turnover in a year’s time.

Side by side with portal developments, Allindia.com has also entered another promising area, Web consultancy. It has till now developed websites for a range of Indian companies, including Tata Steel, ESAB India, Bengal Ambuja, Allahabad Bank and Modi Telstra. Todi expects this business to grow fast with Indian business slowly but steadily resorting to e-commerce.

An exciting job

"Implementing e-business models for different clients has been exciting for us," Todi says. Recently Allindia.com integrated Tata Steel’s supply chain with the Web and devised a security audit plan for an Order Tracking System. For Bengal Ambuja Housing Development Ltd., a joint venture housing company between West Bengal Housing Board and Gujarat Ambuja Cements Ltd, it developed a website enlisting detailed information or everything including the site map, floor plans of the buildings, number of rooms and their layouts in different flats and also amenities available on application to actual booking. "There were 740 people, mostly Indians living abroad, who, on the basis of this information, applied for flats and quite a few of them were allotted flats in the lucky draw thereafter," Todi adds.

Two other strategic projects in Web consultancy have been with Allahabad Bank and Modi Telstra. Other than providing all routine information like the bank’s various deposit and loan schemes and interest rates, Allahabad Bank’s website offers interactive loan application facilities whereby an applicant can actually fill in the application from and get clearance online. In case of Modi Telstra, now Spice Telecom, they developed the Web messaging facility, known as SMS. This allows its subscribers to receive e-mail on their handsets. The subscribers can also view their mail by logging onto the moditelstraindia website at some nearby PC.

Of all these projects, Todi is thrilled with the ESAB India project. This Indian subsidiary of the Swiss multinational that manufactures and distributes welding equipment and industrial gas and medical gas equipment, wanted an e-business model to enable its dealers and key customers to transact with the company electronically, over the Web and the company’s proposed Extranet. "We have not only done the job successfully, but also managed to develop an interface with the existing MIS system spread over multiple locations all over India," he asserts. And this has helped the company save a tidy sum.

But not everyone in the trade shares Todi’s bullish stance on Web consultancy. E-commerce in India is still in a nascent stage, growing only at a snail’s pace. "India does not figure anywhere in the list of the world’s top 15 net-user countries like the US, Japan, Germany, UK, China, Canada, South Korea, Australia and the Netherlands and that does not augur a very bright future for e-commerce at least immediately," says an analyst. Indian netizens number 4.5 million from a population that exceeds a billion. That is minuscule compared to a figure of over 50 per cent in Singapore, Finland and the US.

Todi builds his hope also on an increase in Internet ad revenue. Like most other dot.com companies in India, Allindia.com is trying to raise funds through some disinvestments of its share. Recently the company offloaded 5 per cent of its equity to Singapore-based Kawamin Pacific Pte Ltd, a global trader in non-ferrous metals. Todi does not quote the price, nor does he mention if it is has been commensurate with Allindia.com’s valuation, which Ernst & Young puts at Rs 60 crore. However, Todi can still offload another 15 per cent and it reportedly negotiation with a numbers of buyers for the best price.

Allindia.com is now on an expansion spree, expanding business to Delhi and Mumbai and also to Singapore, the Internet city with the second highest Internet penetration only after Norway, and there seems to be very little to hold it back.