NComputing eyes 40% sales from south

California-based NComputing Inc, a privately-held virtual PC solutions company, expects around 40 per cent of its sales to come from south India, said chief marketing officer, Raj Shah.

"South India is a strategic region for us as the education sector here is so advanced and there is high level of interest in computerising at the state-government level. We hope to derive close to 35-40 per cent of our sales from here, and that will be the case for the next few years. We have offices in Chennai and Bangalore to oversee our growth in this region, and will soon have our presence in Hyderabad," he told Business Standard.

NComputing, which began operations in India in April 2007, has been adopting a multi-pronged approach to the market in India since then, breaking the education market into government and private.

It has two product lines "� X-series and L-series. While X-series enables a single PC to be shared by up to 7 users at the same time, L-series enables up to 30 users to share a single PC or a server. The price of an X-series is about Rs 4,000 while for the L-series it is a bit higher.

Stating that the education market in India is very large and growing, with over a million government schools, 50,000 colleges and universities and 200,000 training centres, Shah said India had always focused on education and it was the path out of poverty for tens of millions of Indians.

"While in the past education was around core subjects like math and science, the digital economy now demands that students have expertise in computers. But affordability of the equipment is a key problem with many," he said.

Shah said the company had deployed its solution in 12 states from Assam to Maharashtra across state-government and NGO-run schools.

NComputing is in talks with about a dozen state governments across the country for providing large deployments, while it is in early stages of negotiations with about 350 schools with about 5,000 computing seats. As many of these schools and states move from early pilots to full-scale deployment, it expects to see the numbers multiply rapidly, he added.

NComputing devices use only 1 watt of electricity as compared with 110 watts for a typical PC.

"In the past few months, the company has sold 10,000 units in the country. Many of these units are deployed as pilot sites as customers typically like to deploy the solution in a few schools or areas before a broad rollout to thousands of schools. We expect to sell in excess of 150,000 units in the country this year," Shah said.