Drishti launches DACX Ameyo - Communications suite for Contact Centers and Enterprises

Drishti launches comprehensive communications suite for emerging contact centers and enterprises. The SOA and MDA based technology platform offers telco-grade reliability, high scalability, rapid application development, deployment flexibility along with multi-tenancy capabilities.

Gurgaon, 24 September, 2008 – Drishti-Soft Solutions, a leading provider of communications solutions, announces the launch of an innovative communications suite for contact centers and enterprises. After the huge success of its flagship product DACX Contact Center Suite that has made Drishti a market leader, Drishti has launched a cutting-edge communications solution – DACX Ameyo.

DACX Ameyo is an all-in-one communication suite for enterprises offering next-generation information and communications management capabilities including ACD, IP-PBX, CTI, IVR, Predictive dialer, Voice Logger, Presence, Sales Management, Customer Care, and Reporting. It specifically boasts of its custom communication flows with application integration and collaboration capabilities across multiple media (Voice, Video, Chat, SMS, E-mail).

DACX Ameyo has been designed with a view to offer innovative business packages, on Hosted (SaaS), On-Premise and hybrid models, as per specific needs of enterprises with processes and business models across different verticals such as Telecom, BFSI, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality. This approach empowers Contact Centers and Enterprises to extract the most from their technology while keeping their technology costs manageable. They can pick-n-choose the best package in terms of price-performance proposition and add on more capabilities as they grow.

Based on new age technologies and concepts like SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), Drishti's patent pending ComponentService™ framework offers high availability by eliminating single point of failure while processing events and messages in a real-time environment in an enterprise communication system. DACX Ameyo ensures telco-grade reliability at a software level that is difficult to achieve in conventional setups. "Such capabilities have allowed us to innovate further and bring to our customers rich functionalities that empower them to be more agile and adaptable to their changing business environments, "says Nayan Jain, CTO at Drishti. He further elucidates, "MDA enables us to develop new functionalities and capabilities in record time using simple drag and drop interface. It helps us cut back on coding time as well as development costs, the benefits of which are passed on to our customers."

Some of the benefits that DACX Ameyo offers to businesses are -

• Ability to better meet changing business requirements

• Telco-grade reliability in software with distributed architecture

• Lower hardware and technology investments

• Ability to leverage existing applications and infrastructure

• Ability to integrate with communication infrastructure (telephony/data network) and business applications (CRM, HRMS, MIS, CMS) to build composite applications that can be administered and managed centrally

• Flexible business offerings for On-premise, Distributed sites, as well as hosted (SaaS) setups.

Leveraging SOA and open standards, the web-enabled solution facilitates application collaboration and integration. This enhances information flow across different departments and system entities across the enterprise leading to a seamless communications experience.

By providing actionable business intelligence with parameters like Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), management can spend time on improving productivity rather than wasting bandwidth on escalations and internal negotiations. This is critical to improve workforce throughput and operational efficiencies that ultimately impact the bottom - and top-line of the organization.

Moreover the enterprises can leverage their existing applications or systems and do away with the costly maintenance and software upgrades. DACX Ameyo runs on industry-grade, commercial-off-the-shelf servers and does not need expensive legacy gateways, cards, etc. With its all-in-one approach DACX Ameyo also minimizes dependence on third-party applications and tools.

DACX Ameyo has already been recognized with technology awards such as IP Contact Center Technology Pioneer Award 2008 and Member's Choice Award 2008. It has been successfully powering business processes at Motilal Oswal Securities Limited (a leading financial advisory firm), Damas (a global brand in jewellery and watch collection) and many other reputed organizations.

About DACX Ameyo

DACX Ameyo is an all-in-one communications suite that offers holistic contact management capabilities for contact centers and enterprises.The IP-based communications solution provides interaction management features such as multi-site, need-based and skill-based routing, self- and assisted-service, multimedia integration (Email, SMS, chat, Fax), IP-PBX/PBX call processing with voicemail and call recording, outbound capability with predictive dialing, ACD with multimedia queuing, IVR with Communication flow Designer, CTI, Quality Monitoring, Collaboration capabilities (Unified Messaging, Presence Management, Conferencing) and Cradle-to-Grave Reporting.Tools such as the Ticketing system and Notification & Reminders can be effortlessly integrated with other back office applications to increase process efficiency levels.For more information, visit www.dacxameyo.com.

About Drishti

Drishti is a leading provider of Contact Center Software & Enterprise Communications Solutions. Drishti's award-winning flagship offering – DACX Contact Center Suite has been a huge success in India and Philippines within a span of two years. Drishti creates innovative Communications technologies for the next-generation Enterprises, empowering them to dynamically manage their Business Processes. Drishti's customers enjoy significant benefits in terms of increase in efficiency levels, reduction in operational costs, flexibility to grow, consistent user experience and a demonstrable ROI.Drishti's innovative solutions are running successfully at more than 200 client locations across India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Dubai and US as recognized by the three awards IP Contact Center Technology Awards 2008, Member's Choice Award 2008 (Best ACD/Switch, Best in Class Overall Category Winner - Best Outbound Solution and Highly Recommended Best After Sales Support) and BPONews Best Contact Center Solution 2007.

OnlyGizmos

OnlyGizmos.com – Your Daily Dose of Technology!

As the years pass the role of technology in our lives and the society has grown significantly. Gadgets and Gizmos is the heartbeat of the youth and OnlyGizmos presents technology in a unique way.

OnlyGizmos actively covers technology festivals and events. The coverage of the IIT TechFest 2008 has been the most significant till date. OnlyGizmos brings an all new culture of online media, we cover important events live and Report them live over the web. Our live reporting of the IIT TechFest 08 and several other product launches across the globe brings the latest to our readers just as it happens.

“In the last 6 months we have had over 300000 hits, mainly from India. We are committed to bring the latest in technology to our audience. We live technology, we dream technology, we wakeup every morning to see new gadgets and gizmos.”. - said Annkur P Agarwal, Editor – OnlyGizmos.com and CEO Kratee e-commerce and consulting Ltd.

What more, listen to the industry gurus speaking exclusively on technology, internet and more. OnlyGizmos invites CEO’s and techgurus to publish guest posts on their view of the tech world.

The team at OnlyGizmos features several writers from different fields and this provide a unique mix to the readers. OnlyGizmos presents a variety of exclusive content ranging from tech-reviews to tech-tips.

About Kratee:

Founded in 1985 Kratee e-commerce and consulting Ltd (Previously known as Olympic Advertising Ltd) worked as an advertising agency in the early 90’s. With changing trends recently the company has dedicated its focus on e-commerce. Kratee plans to expand its operations in areas of ecommerce, software development and online media.

Loconomy

Loconomy is a year old startup, currently operating only in Bangalore. It aims to combine the concepts of web/application hosting, local search and user reviews into a single unified platform.

For consumer-oriented local businesses, Loconomy is first publishing platform. It provides tools and backend support for businesses to publish and manage all type of business information including catalogues, photos, videos, deals, events and more.

Loconomy Loco sites platform allows businesses to create custom designed dynamic websites, managed and hosted by Loconomy. In addition to this, Loconomy also provides a growing set of applications that businesses can choose to subscribe to e.g. online table booking, appointment booking and ordering.

For end users, Loconomy is the one stop destination to search and interact with local businesses via web or mobile. Because all the loco sites hosted by Loconomy are part of the same platform, Loconomy is able to provide a deeper search experience than any other site.

Team overview:

Loconomy was started by Sanjay, Gaurav, Pallavi and Naveen. They bring vast technology, retail and marketing expertise to Loconomy. Loconomy has been under development since March, 2007. You may find details about founders at: http://www.loconomy.com/home/about

Competitive Advantage

For the end users, a common example that shows the difference is - search for “neer dosa” in koramangala [http://bangalore.loconomy.com/search/searchall?q=neer+dosa&l=koramangala] on Loconomy and on any other site. If you like neer dosa, you will become an instant fan of loconomy.com.

Please feel free to send your comments to sanjay@loconomy.com

DilSeBol

About DilSeBol:
DilSeBol Customized Apparel Pvt Ltd was established in 2006 and our portal, www.DilSeBol.com was launched officially on 14th April 2007. DilSeBol specializes in production of customized printed products, the designs for which can be easily and quickly created by users at www.dilsebol.com using our proprietary design tool called “The Artist”. The current products available include t-shirts, mugs, coasters, ceramic tiles, mouse pads, shirts, caps and polo t-shirts. In the near future, paper print products like posters, photo books etc will also be introduced. As the focus is on creating customized products as per the customer’s requirement, each design is printed on the product only on order and the entire order processing set-up is geared towards handling single, unique items. This approach is different from that of mass manufacturer’s who make large lots and keep it as inventory.

Founding and Management Team:
The founding team consists of Suresh Subbian, Ravi Kumar and Kapil Vishwanathan.
Suresh has an Engineering background and has been associated with a few ventures in Tirupur related to garment dyeing and manufacturing. Suresh is also the co-founder of CK Technologies, a Chennai-based software company specializing in Indian language computing.
Ravi Kumar is a management graduate from IIMA and has worked across different areas in Sales and Marketing in the world’s largest beverage company and in Supply chain & Project Management in one of the leading consulting companies in the world. This is Ravi’s first experience in creating a new venture.
Kapil Vishwanathan is a Harvard and Stanford alumni and is also the co-founder of PreMedia Global, a cross-border publishing services company with operations in the US and India.
Suresh and Ravi manage the day to day operations of DilSeBol.com. Suresh mainly takes care of manufacturing and procurement while Ravi looks at customer service, marketing and website development.

Focus Areas:
We plan to focus on a few things to differentiate ourselves
1. Great focus on apparels which implies offering a lot of options in terms of styles and colors.
2. High quality commitment with a no questions asked replacement guarantee. We have our own apparel label made as per our specifications, under strict quality control standards. We also have a great combination of different printing methods that we use to get the best output for each design based on its unique requirements. This gives us great confidence in our quality which makes offering a free replacement not a big challenge for us, because there are so few complaints! We don’t believe in empty boasts like “best customized products” etc, but we have a great number of repeat customers and great positive feedback coming our way, which makes us believe that we are delivering what we promise consistently!
3. Our proprietary design application which is probably the easiest design application available online today will continue to evolve and offer more features to users while remaining highly user-friendly

Differentiators for DilSeBol.com:
DilSeBol provides the tools required for people to create their own designs, review it online to see how it will turn out on a product and then ultimately, order it with us if they like what they see. Our easy to use, proprietary design tool, “The Artist” is ideal for everyone, even people not familiar with design software like Photoshop etc. This is probably the most attractive feature. Also, we don’t place restrictions on the picture resolution that is to be uploaded, so we work on even low resolution pictures and enhance it to bring out good quality output.
Finally, we offer a slew of color options on apparel which is hard to find anywhere else.

Challenges:
By far our biggest challenge is to ensure that we are able to maintain our promised delivery time of 4 days or under for customized orders. We need to ensure that our manufacturing process gets completed in time. We find that courier service is still not 100% reliable and therefore, we try and turn around orders on the same day to give one more day to the courier service provider.

Lootstreet.com

Why buy at a Fixed Price or fight with other buyer in an Auction, when you can directly Haggle and Bargain with the seller as in real life!

About LootStreet.com

Lootstreet.com (www.lootstreet.com) is a next-generation online marketplace which is specially adapted to the Indian/Asian scenario. Lootstreet portal hosts both new and used goods – it follows a unique model of price determination of a sale with a simple underlying ideology - “Every Price is Negotiable”. Most importantly, this will finally give every Indian the right to buy a product at the price he/she thinks is fair. E-commerce, as we have known it in the past, will shortly be re-defined.

The Pain Point being addressed

The lack of a ‘real marketplace’ in the virtual world - that which is specifically suited to the shopping mentality and the purchasing pattern of the ‘involved buyer’ (more specifically Indian/Asian buyer)

Our vision

Our vision of the virtual world and its features is one that gives every user the democratic right to act - in this case ‘shop’ while having a say in the price of the purchased product. A first of its kind – LootStreet.com has successfully customized the online shopping process to suit the preferences and mentality of the Indian buyer by combining the price-flexibilities of real-life shopping and convenience of online shopping.

Founders

The company is headed by two 2008 IIM Ahmedabad graduates who gave up lucrative job offers at some of the world’s best investment banks to build a team of 8 in a short span of time, spearheading them to conduct a full-fledged research on the buying patterns of Indians and launching the promised product within 60 days of their Post graduate convocation ceremony. In February 2008, Kaushik Mukherjee and Arun Balakrishnan, two PGP students of the 2008 batch of IIM Ahmedabad founded AKVENTURE Info Pvt. Ltd. (link:http://www.lootstreet.com/whoarewe/whoarewe.php). LootStreet.com is their first homegrown project.

Uniqueness of Offering and Target Segment

The current online shopping portals either follow the Fixed Priced System or the Auction System, which is more of a Western model (which evolved from the real-life auction houses such as Sotheby’s) that has been force-fitted for the Indian online shopper. In reality, the Indian shopper is a more involved buyer and the average Indian has never even witnessed an auction process in his life. What is unique about LootStreet.com is that is customizes online shopping to presenting every buyer with the exact options that real life shopping has to offer.

How do we accomplish this?

(1) Through innovative yet simple-to-understand process of bargaining
(2) By offering the facility of collective bargaining, where bulk discounts are worked out based on the number of people who are interested in buying a particular item. With a target market of every internet enabled Indians and non-Indians alike, LootStreet is the closest one would get to a real life market!

Growth Story

LootStreet.com received media attention during the March 2008 (IIMA’s placement press conference), owing to the curiosity that surrounds every entrepreneurs decision to take the plunge. With mounting expectations (repeated articles and interviews about an underdevelopment product), competition from other online marketplaces (www.lootmaar.com was launched within 2 weeks of the publicity period), the team managed to build a database of 2000+ visitors to our homepage before launch and partner with 6 of India’s biggest online sellers to offer a comprehensive catalogue of 4000+ products at the time of launch.

webVastra

webVastra is an early stage e-commerce venture in the online retailing of customized fashion apparels. The firm is currently selling customized T-shirts over the internet through the portal http://www.webvastra.in/. The firm’s USP is to provide premium quality customized T-shirts at reasonable price to its target customers. The firm is registered at the Science & Technology Entrepreneurs Park at IIT Kharagpur.

Vision

Provide end to end solutions for premium quality customized apparels to our valued customers at value price by providing a highly immersive shopping environment

Promoters

WebVastra was established on April 2007, from IIT Kharagpur. The site was formally launched on 19th June 2007. The Co founders of the firm are:

· Dharamveer Arora (B.Tech, IT BHU Varanasi, three years of experience in Steel & IT industry)
· Nishank Agrawal (B.Tech, IIT Kanpur, two years experience in Construction industry)
· Santhosh S Subramanium (B. E., Bharti Sadan University three years experience in IT industry)
· Ashutosh Chouksey (B.Tech, MANIT Bhopal)
· Amit V Joshi (B Tech, VNIT Nagpur, four years experience in Defence Research & Automobile Design)

Management Structure

The organization structure is flat with each partner handling the following responsibilities

· Dharamveer Arora – Sales & Marketing and external communication
· Nishank Agrawal – Operations & Finance
· Santhosh S Subramanium – Design and Marketing
· Ashutosh Chouksey – Finance & Logistics
· Amit V Joshi – Design & Marketing

Concept Description

The firm is engaged in providing customized T-shirts to the customers through web portal www.webvastra.in. This user-friendly portal lets the user customize his/her T-shirt in 3 simple steps:

1. Select T-shirt style: Round-neck, V-neck and ring-neck style for men & women.
2. Select the Color: From the color pallet.
3. Select the Design: Around 75 designs in different categories.

The customer can play around with the style, colour or design of the T-shirt .The payment is accepted by means of credit card/net banking/ cheque/ DD/ ITZ cash card once the final product is customized. The firm has hired the services of a payment gateway provider which is Verisign secured for online payments. The T-shirt is delivered at the doorsteps of the customer within eight working days by a reputed courier company.

Bulk orders

The Firm is also engaged in providing complete T-Shirt solutions (from designing, based on the theme, to delivery) to institutional customers like corporate, institutes, events. Customers can place their enquiry on the website in the bulk enquiry segment.

Quality

The quality of the T-shirts offered is comparable to any premium branded T-shirts. The T-shirts are made of 180 GSM super combed smooth cotton fabric. Currently, the firm has tie up with suppliers, based out of Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu), with excellent global client record

Way Ahead

The strategy envisaged by the firm in short term is

· Quality Personalization T-Shirts (where customer can upload his/her own images). Currently there is no good quality personalized T-Shirts available in the market
· Increasing the designs to 500, T-Shirt styles to 8, and T-Shirt colors to 10
· Premium Customized Sweat Shirts

Long-term strategy

· Premium Customized Apparel brand
· One stop Customized T-Shirt solution
· Global delivery model
· Expanding to Ethnic and Western Customized Fashion Apparel
· Offline model (kiosk) in retail outlets

creAdivity

creAdivity is a technology-based platform for people who are interested in giving vent to their creative energies but do not have the right outlet to do so. Simultaneously, it is a place where organizations – especially small and medium enterprises – can get innovative solutions to their advertising and marketing related problems.

creAdivity has, within it, a marketplace which brings potential clients in touch with creative enthusiasts such as management and design students, free-lancers, professional designers and artists. The creatives can also collaborate among themselves using custom built professional networking tools made available to them by creAdivity.

Here’s what sets creAdivity apart from the others:

1. It is a unique concept – there are no instances of similar enterprises functioning at a mature stage in India
2. There will be two complementary parts of the platform – a professional network of creatives and managers and a state-of-the-art marketplace – with inter-linkages between the two
3. The underlying philosophy behind creAdivity is of “creative collaboration”. There will be tools which will help the creative community collaborate and discuss when they have to come-up with solutions to business problems.

creAdivity (http://www.creadivity.com/, for beta) is in incubation stage and currently pilot programs being run to gauge the market readiness for the concept. So far the founders have managed to bring together about 40 creatives who have shown keen interest in the model and have been participating in various activities on creAdivity.

For the pilot, creAdivity has so far organized competitions in which participants were asked to make advertising campaigns for hypothetical client situations and give rationale for the same from a marketing stand-point. Some of the competitions were:

· Design a campaign for a multiplex in a metro, encouraging people to see movies on weekdays to boost its mid-week sales
· Design a campaign for a travel and tourism company showcasing the benefits of touring different places in India for each month of the year(a set of 12 ads with one theme)
· Devise a strategy for ‘branding art’ to promote artists of different genres.

Some very encouraging responses were received from creatives and the standards of competition have also been quite high. The company is working on modifying the platform to cater to the needs of potential clients and is about to get into client acquisition mode starting this quarter. With a team from top B Schools like IIMs, ISB & Great Lakes - creAdvity is all set to rock!