Excerpt from interview with Neelam Dhawan, Managing Director, Hewlett-Packard India

On www.business-standard.com/india on 19 May 2009

What about telecom? It appears that IBM is a clear leader in this space…

When Indian telecom companies went for outsourcing services, the deals went to IBM. It has a model which we could never match but we have products in both hardware and software that are used internally for billing purposes. These are solutions that HP has continued to sell in the country and that’s helping us grow. Now that the government has announced licences for five new operators, we are very excited. They will need infrastructure. And we have developed new ways of designing data centres with cooling and power efficiency. Take, for instance, our dynamic smart cooling solutions. Data centres must have air-conditioning which costs a bomb. Dynamic cooling reduces costs by sensing hot spots and cooling them rather than cooling the entire data centre. This reduces air-conditioning costs by 40-45 per cent. Some telecom companies have already given us orders which we executed in December, March and April.

But you appear to have woken up late when it comes to low-cost netbooks and the mobile space which is booming…

To think that PCs will be the device that will be used to access information is erroneous. Mobile is surely the way to go. However, our focus is not to make a mobile device. Rather, our focus is on how the mobile device can become the centre of computing. Whether you want to access your bank or make a secure payment, security is a big issue. Consider a streaming video-on-demand or direct-to-home (DTH) broadcast or any Visa/Mastercard transaction — all these applications link back to storage or server applications. The question, however, is how do you enable all this in a secure environment? So our focus is on secure transactions using the phone.

Every time you see a reality show where you need to SMS a number, there is a server doing the backend work — and 90 per cent of those servers are from HP. I have 130 organisations that do value-added services for telecom service providers using our product.I must now come to netbooks.

Let me tell you that we launched netbooks in February. A little late though, we launched consumer and commercial netbooks. We also got the consumer netbooks designed and offered them in different colours. They also have a slot for a 3G simcard. Netbooks are doing well for us. February was a record month for us.