The full form of a paper presented at the valedictory function of the National Conference on E Business Integration at GRG Institute of Management Studies Coimbatore on October 6, 2015.

1. INTEGRATING ‘E’ INTO ORDINARY BUSINESSES
- Nimal C Namboodiripad
(Part of this article formed the valedictory speech at the National Conference on E-
Business Integration organized by the GRG Institute of Management and Global Vision
Infocon Services at the campus of PSGR Krishnammal Educational Institutions for Women on
the 6th of October, 2015.)
Introduction:
India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on the fast path of digitalization. At this
juncture a discussion on e-business integration is of great relevance. This paper looks at how
over the years the electronic (e) part was incorporated into the ordinary businesses of which
the author was a part of as a consultant.
Before the universe was born:
Scientist these days are on a quest to find out about a period when the universe was
still unborn. Like the Rishis and Munis of yore they are trying to wrap their minds around a
concept of something beyond space and time. Now in many of your cases if I speak of a time
before computers appeared on this earth the effect will be the same. You won’t be able to
envision the scenario and it will boggle your mind. But I can proudly claim ‘I was there’. I
straddle the divide between the computerless and digital era and have a leg planted, a bit
precariously, in each space.
Browse: For those of us who were products of the pre 1980s, browsing meant going to
the library or nearby book shop at your leisure, walking around the aisle enjoying the
beautiful smell of the learned tomes and picking a couple of your favourites at the fag end
of an enjoyable and memorable hour or two thus spent. And there was no google or bing or
any other search engines in sight to provide us with instantaneous gratification and a new
meaning to the word browsing.
Smart Class: Our smart class started and ended with the salt and pepper, mustachioed
chemistry professor picking up a fresh piece of chalk from his table, putting it between his
thumb and forefinger and then raising it to shoulder height before pointing to it with the
index finger of his left hand and telling us “now suppose this is a test tube. If you pour
sulphuric acid…”
Mail: The choice of mail as we had in those days was between a card, inland and an
envelope one. Of course you had the Money Order for super fast money transfers and the
telegram for emergencies but communication happened at the record speed of a snail in
marathon mode and sometimes traversed places where it had no rhyme, reason or license
to go before reaching its destination. To increase the speed of the snail mail and to ensure
that it reached the right destination we used to send it without sticking the obligatory
stamp. The additional money that was collected from the receiver was still less than what
we would have spent on a registered post.
Animation: In those days animation was no joke. You had to manually draw series upon
series of scenes which was then converted into film. Hours of backbreaking work for very
little reward, compared to the ease with which animation is done on the computer in the
present era.
Initiation into the World of Bytes:

2. Then suddenly into my first year of post graduation I was left facing a computer which
was a bit on the temperamental side to say the least. We trooped into the Electronic Data
Processing(EDP) centre weekly once, religiously, without fail, to understand the basics of
Lotus, Basic and Wordstar.
Working on the computer: But working on the computer was a different kettle of fish. It
frequently went on the blink and the service guys being constantly run off their feet it was
left to our resident geek to bring it into some sort of working condition. He was a MA in
Arabic from an obscure village, where the closest public transport was three kilometers
near. But he was good with a screwdriver and was very efficient in dismantling all the
‘dismantlables’ and putting them back together again. And if that failed to work, which
fortunately was very rarely, we sort of used the computer as a punching bag until it
sputtered and groaned to a start.
Checking printouts: I had a boss who used to ask my help for typing letters and then
taking the printouts of the same. The first time I was perplexed to watch him anxiously
scouring the output that the dot matrix spit out and enquired about the reason. “Of course
to check out whether it is the same as what I saw on the monitor.” And the ironic part was
that he had reason, for sometimes it did impart gobbledygook when you were least
expecting it.
Sending e-mails: The early 1990s was when I was inducted into the world of emails. Of
course it was a source of wonder to me that I could sit at my office at 9.30 in the night and
chat to my cousin sister who was a world away in the US of A. But the reason I was there at
9.30 in the first place was that I was not able to send the mail in the morning when the
traffic was at peak and had sat listening to the dial up connection making sporadic squeaks
as it tried to log on to the server while drinking copious amounts of tea as suggested by the
small icon of a steaming tea cup that doubled as the cursor when sending the e-mail.
And then into E-Business:
There came a time when we had clients who were into the business of computers and
who did business on the internet. Of course we still used to call up the clients to check
whether they had got our email and used to send confirmatory copies of the said emails in
the old fashioned envelope. Or God forbid, if the matter was urgent, we faxed it!
Compaq: Although Compaq was a client of the company I was working in, I was not
involved in any of their work. But the fact that the boss who used to cross check each
printout later became one of its top honchos shows how integration took place seamlessly.
Federal Bank: The launch of Federal bank’s Core Banking Solution at The Hotel Ashok in
Bangalore with Infosys chief Narayana Murthy in the presence of Chandra Kochar was the
beginning of an e-business revolution in the bank. They were the pioneers among banks
from Kerala on many fronts, being early bird entrants into ATMs as well as internet banking
but the promotion for these was done through the age old media of dailies and press
conferences. The name FedNet for the internet banking was decided through market
research, but by conducting household surveys and not online ones!
Pooja Online: This was one of the dotcom companies that went bust. One of the
services they were offering was an astrological reading. We went to an astrologer in Kerala
and gave the horoscopes of the top management to do a sample reading to fix him as one of
the consultants. He took a look at them and asked ‘do you work in this company?’ ‘No, we
are consultants, why?’ “They are all going through a bad phase, so the prospects are bad.’
Well I didn’t lose anything in that project but I did lose some money buying units in a
Franklin Templeton Internet Opportunities Fund.

3. Monster India: This was how another function other than marketing went the electronic
way with on line recruitment companies helping out the HR managers for their sourcing
needs. They were one of our clients and advertised massively in not only dailies but TV.
Digital and more…:
Over the years we saw SAP and its ERP system changed the way Production and
Operations functions worked and were perceived. And accounting systems got slowly
networked through the world wide web and the cloud. As brand consultants we were asked
to advertise on the web through banner ads, Google Adwords, we did viral marketing and
SMS campaigns. We were slowly becoming completely and irrevocably digital.
Bakers: At Bakers we have done Onsite SEO optimization, Social Media Marketing
leading to offsite optimization and we have changed the way the marketing is coordinated.
Where earlier the sales people had to go to the nearest telephone booth to send in orders
later they were doing it through SMS and now WhatsApp. All reports are emailed and
payments made by RTGS and NEFT.
BigShopIn: This is an E-commerce portal from Coimbatore that we started from scratch.
It sold all kinds of products from bags and travel accessories to watches, flashlights and
groceries. Setting up the logistics was an arduous process, but through trial and error we
ultimately came up with a sustainable model. Until Flipkart, Snapdeal and others opened up
and made themselves vendor friendly. Now BigShopIn also sells through Flipkart and other
portals. It is a constantly evolving market place.
Enrich Expo: It is a virtual exhibition where colleges can set up stalls in educational
expos or people can sell their wares in their showrooms just like a brick and mortar one.
With a generation who increasingly is addicted to computer games this is right up their alley
and is becoming very popular. We launched it in Coimbatore with a press conference but
unlike the earlier instances the major promotion for this is and will definitely be through
digital marketing and PR.
One Digital Future of Education: This is a class room engagement software where we
can have tablet or laptop based interactive classroom sessions and has been taken up by
institutes like IIT Chennai. The software doesn’t need internet or intranet connectivity and
works using a local router. This small radius connectivity technology of DFoE has found
many takers and may soon be seen in the Indian Railways to further Shri Narendra Modi’s
vision of a WiFi India.
In conclusion: the future
We are now working with an Android App Training team and with our PM’s idea of JAM
we feel Mobiles and Android technology is the future. And like any E-business person worth
his salt when we talk of the future of technology we are talking only of a time frame of two
to three years and we hope to make use of this window.
We may have travelled a long way and when we look back can see that we have
involved ourselves in many ventures that are digital in nature, but we realized that what we
were doing comes under the label of E-business only recently. Well that is a blessing in
disguise, because maybe, just maybe, if we had known earlier we wouldn’t have had the
courage to attempt the same!!