MUMBAI: Mumbai-based entertainment company Western Outdoor Interactive (WOI)
Company has floated a new company called The Argon Company (TAC). TAC will offer
Internet and intranet solutions under the name The Argon Services (TAS).
Western Outdoor Interactive (WOI) Company, headed by Anil Nanavati, who will
be the CEO of TAC, has invested a substantial amount in the company. While he
declined to put a figure on the investments, he said that the newly formed
company was seeking more investors.
According to Mr Nanavati, the whole solution was built around Linux-based
software developed by TAC, which not only provides e- mail and Internet at the
workstation level in a LAN environment, but also seamlessly integrates print and
file server functions. ‘TAC is positioned as a service, not a software
product, and handles various stages - from ISP selection and domain registration
to Web site development and hosting,"’ he explained.
Besides this, TAC would also look after the setup of the network at customer
site, maintain related software and hardware, user training through Argon
College. A call center would handle the problems of the customers.
According to Nanavati, TAS as currently positioned is not offered anywhere in
the world today. Commenting on the state of SMEs in India, Nanavati said that
small and medium sized enterprises in India are only now becoming IT enabled and
they not only face confusing set of technical choices, but also have to deal
with a disparate host of vendors just to get e-mail.
Nanavati claims that TAC would help these SMEs as TAS has been launched as a
one stop shop to handle all the complexities needed to install, operate and
maintain e-mail and Internet and make it an ubiquitous productivity tool as it
is in many parts of the world.