Mahesh Jain of Jataayu Software
By kamla bhatt • Jul 1st, 2006Category: Bangalore, Business & Tech, Ideas, India, Internet & Telecom
Mahesh Jain is the Managing Director of Jataayu Software, Bangalore, India.
In this interview, the focus of the discussion is the WAP market in India and world-wide. According to Mahesh WAP is used by GSM phones to access data. WAP is an alternative to GPRS and SMS.
Jataayu was the first Indian company to make a WAP server. The Indian market constitutes 10 % of Jataayu’s revenue says Mahesh. In 2005 the company’s revenue was approximately $7 million according to Mahesh. Jataayu was founded in 1999 and has been an early mover in the mobile handheld space. Jataayu is a spin-off from Mahesh’s first company Integra Micro System. The company was born when Integra’s product division came up with a mobile prototype in the late 1990s says Mahesh.
In 2000 the company got its first round of funding of $2 million from Tata Consultancy Services and GE Capital and the vision was to build an international product says Mahesh.
The telecom meltdown of 2001-2002 made it difficult for Jataayu to sell during this period. But, today the company’s handheld solutions and infrastructure solutions are licensed to almost all the major handset manufacturers and mobile operators. Mahesh says that about 20 million handsets in the world carry Jataayu software and about 50 operators have Jataayu’s software.
According to Mahesh about 70% of WAP related traffic passes through Jataayu’s WAP servers. Companies like Vodofone, Samsung, Philips license Jataayu’s WAP browser. The one major account missing from Jataayu’s client list is Nokia and Mahesh thinks that by the year end they have a good chance of converting Nokia as their client.
We also discussed a central quest of mine: what will be the primary access device to the Internet in India? Mahesh unhesitatingly replied the mobile phone will be the basic access device to the Internet in India.
Mahesh is a chemical engineer from IIT-Kanpur. He got his masters in engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He founded his first company Integra Micro Systems in 1982.
Mahesh lives with his family in Bangalore.
[…] Last year I interviewed Mahesh Jain, managing director Jataayu, where he spoke about his company and the challenges that Jataayu faced during the telecom meltdown of 2001-2002. Jataayu got its initial round of money from Tata Consultancy Services and GE Capital. This interview was conducted before the Indian telecom subscriber rate was still growing at a moderate rate and not this multi-million per month subscription rate. Technorati tags: jataayu, bharti telesoft, bangalore, mobile, wap, mahesh jain, merger and acquistion, technology No comments for Jataayu Acquisition Completed » […]