Just dial, that's it!

Speaking to CIOL, VVS Mani, CEO and Founder of Just dial, shares the journey so far and the road ahead for the company.

Just Dial has become the name for local and instant search. How do you feel about it? Where do you see the company moving two-three years down the line?

Today, Justdial is India’s No.1 local search engine, with presence on Phone (69999999), Web (justdial.com), WAP (wap.justdial.com) and SMS (53999) with 175,000 sq. ft office space across India. This is a great feeling indeed.

I am very bullish about growing this business at least 50 per cent year-on-year for the next 3-4 years' time in India alone. The company also intends to leverage the brand and know-how for an international franchise.

I hope five years down the line, we would have established a global footprint and garnered high brand equity and recognition across the globe. And we can definitely look at the local market then.

Could you give an idea of India operation — how many companies are listed, what were the numbers like a year ago?

We have 4,000 associates in India. For now, Just Dial’s US operations are also handled out of India. We soon plan to hire up to 1,000 people in the US, mostly in underemployed, rural areas.

We have over a 3 million listings today and the numbers hovered a little over 2.6 million until last year. Our database comprises sponsored and non-sponsored clientèle and we have more than 125,000 advertisers today.

What have been the recent developments in the local team?

We have quite a few aces up our sleeve; to mention a few, we have drawn up new services such as Just Dial Genie, a personal assistant that will enable consumers round-the-clock service for a monthly fee. Genie will allow instant call connect to any business establishment, reminder services and the like.

We are also working on Justdial Application for mobile phones, which would soon be launched for Nokia phones. This will be followed by subsequent releases for BlackBerry and iPhones. We also have a few other special launches coming forth in the near future.

How many cities does Just dial exist in? What are the new geographies slated for expansion, locally and globally?

Justdial caters to over 25 million users across 240 cities in the country via a single number 69999999. In India, Justdial receives over 2,50,000 calls everyday and hosts over 2,25,000 visitors to its website. As far as the US operations are concerned, we are present across all the 50 states in USA on a toll free number.

We will soon expand our reach to include 1200 cities in India very soon.

In the global arena, the days to come will see Just Dial expanding to Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong to fulfill our target of being present in all major English-speaking countries in the next two years.

How does Just dial use the technology for business. Could you share about specific softwares or business application?

We have been using open source technology since over 3 years now, and it has allowed us to scale up in a seamless manner, without having to worry about the procuring part of open source. We were also able to introduce best practices from various fields and add value to our search process.

On the software side, we have adopted the CLAMP stack, which was a combination of C and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. About 200 servers, connecting 3,500 workstations at Just Dial, are powered by this CLAMP stack today.

Just Dial has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to power its servers, Ubuntu on the desktop front, MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB for database management, and WebHuddle for Web conferencing and video conferencing.