Ibm No To Manufacturing Plans

IBM has no plans to start hardware manufacturing operations in the country through its joint venture with Tata Information Services Ltd (TISL).

The 50:50 joint venture with TISL covers five main areas --products, systems integration, education, services and support and exports.

IBM's marketing manager for Asia Pacific, Francis Booth said, "the annual sales volume of personal computers (PCs) in the domestic Indian market do not support the idea of setting up a manufacturing base in India at the moment. However, we are constantly reviewing our options, and are open to the idea of setting up an assembly unit for PCs provided the volumes justify such a move. Last year, around 5,00,000 PCs were sold in the country. IBMs personal computer sold under the `Aptiva' brandname is one of the highest selling MNC brands in the country.

 

Booth said that besides exploring the idea of setting up an assembly unit in India, IBM was also toying with the concept of establishing a third party manufacturing unit in which the essential components will be supplied by IBM but the ultimate product will be assembled by a third party in the country.

This is somewhat similar to IBM's experience in Russia where critical components like electronic parts and the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems for servers are provided by IBM while these are assembled by a third party in the country. More importantly, it does not bear the `IBM' label.

Booth was in the city in connection with the IBM Show , an exhibition of the complete range of IBM's products and services. This was the first of its kind of show being organised by IBM which will later travel to Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Calcutta.

Meanwhile, TISL has ended the fiscal 1996-97 with a 63 per cent rise in its turnover to Rs 550 crore. TISL's vice president (marketing and sales ) Mukesh Aghi said this year the company would focus on total customer satisfaction in terms of providing sales and services support.

As far as PC sales are concerned, the company would depend entirely on channel partners to `fulfill' orders.

Plan to introduce wireless network products

Gajendra Upadhyay NEW DELHI

IBM will be introducing a new range of wireless-local area network (LAN) products in the country by the end of the year. "We are only waiting for the government to clear the frequency bands required for using these products," says Mukesh Aghi, president, marketing and sales, Tata Information Systems Ltd. (TISL).

The LAN products use frequencies in the 2.4 to 2.83 gigahertz range which has to be cleared by the wireless planning commission.

IBM has three types of products for building a wireless LAN: IBM wireless LAN, IBM wireless LAN entry and AS/400 wireless LAN. Of these, it will be introducing the wireless LAN range first. The product consists of a special type of hardware and software that can be installed in a server, workstation or a mobile PC.

The hardware is a wireless-LAN card called an adapter card. This can be easily incorporated into an existing computer. The card uses radio frequencies or infrared -- instead of wires -- to communicate with each other thus allowing a user to converse, retrieve or enter data without having his or her personal or notebook computer physically attached to a wired LAN or telephone line.

Wireless LANs will be a specially attractive product for mobile workers who can connect from anywhere in an office building or a campus - as long as they are within the radio range -- to the LAN without having to plug into a communications port. "IBM is looking at a computing environment where there are no wires. For, that's where the future is," says Aghi.

There are three ways in which the IBM wireless LAN products can be connected : from a central base to a remote terminal; from one terminal to another directly (called peer-to-peer) and through a micro-cellular architecture.

The most commonly used of these is the base-to-remote which can be used within a single building or an integrated set of buildings.

Many remote terminals can log on to a central base.

It can work as a standalone wireless LAN or be an extension to an existing wired LAN.

Peer-to-peer wireless LANs permit direct communication between devices without going through a base station. These networks are quick to install and therefore well suited to ad hoc networking. This is ideally suited for short projects in remote areas where a group can quickly get down to work, pack up and leave. The downside to peer-to-peer is that security and network management concerns are not easily addressed and the range of communications is limited.

Micro-cellular wireless LANs are analogous to the technique used in cellular telephones except that these are restricted to a local area due to the restricted range of LAN radios.