News
Deccan Herald, Bangalore - Monday, May 8 th , 2001.
 
 

Out of the box.com success

Internet led to the birth of the idea that learning and teaching needed to be placed in the new context of unstructured and informal learning, especially for adult learners who show various signs of resistance to learning. This realization in turn led to the setting up of careercommunty.com. Hyderabad- based multi-crore company CCDC Ltd., is all set to emerge as one of the few dotcom successes amidst dotcom busts, drifts and closedowns. CCDC Ltd, a Rs. 11 crore company was set up last year when super successful dotcoms were the toast of global gossip. When the dotcoms began to disappear from the screen, not only CCDC remained afloat but it is all set to break even in a few moths. The company registered a turnover of Rs 12 crore last year.

CCDC, MD and CEO, T. Muralidharan believes that the major factor behind the success is that he caught on to the trend even as a badly emerged, the business of producing and disseminating knowledge for highly specific needs of highly targeted people. The result was the developing of two products that were the first of its kind in
Asia- managementor.com and careermosiacindia.com. While the former helps corporates enhance managing competence of their people, the latter is a job portal. Available on subscription, managementor.com has been installed by over 35 companies and 4500 individual members. “Continuous educational professional education is the new buzz word”, says Muralidharan, alumni of IIT Chennai and IIMA. While he trot the unchartered area of teaching adults in their own terms by interfacing with the internet, he also took the risk of charging a subscription for the services. Having recruited thousands of professionals through the parent organization TMI Network, Mr Muralidharan realized that while there was plenty of talent in the country. Its biggest drawback was its poor skills in management- skills, resources, time, organization and people. “Indians should become world-class managers if these skills are honed and knowledge base updated,” he says.

Another lacuna for the managers when they are looking for a change is that they tend to be “non-contemporary”. In the context of the future placement and the employer. “The managementor will help companies transform their employees into knowledge workers and broad base their skills beyond their current domain”, says Mr Murali. This would ultimately have a positive impact on bottom line. Managementor.com facilitates access to latest world-class practices and practical ideas presented by an over 70 member strong content team of CCDC. These knowledge coordinators working in a full eCRM environment help members do their research and solve problems through
K-queries and e-Case studies. The product is delivered on Internet, corporate intranets and also emails (k-mailers).

“Information and intermediation will be the biggest business in India with a huge market potential of $ 2- 10 million”, says Mr Murali. Other product of CCDC is a job site career mosaicindia.com developed in association with career mosaic-headhunter.net, a leading global recruitment site. The job site will also have its operations abroad, in Middle East, US, Singapore, Indonesia, The Philippines and South America. It will soon add new features like resume builder and campus India for fresher jobs.

Waiting in the wings is the manage IT and on–line product that will help IT professionals acquire managerial skills, a $ 300-Million market. CCDC has formulated a plan to introduce a series of products to grab a share of $50 - $100 million in the future.

With the recognition that the offerings of the internet need to be combined with the other media and convert potential adversarial relationships to win-win relations. CCDC tied up with two leading media groups increasing brand visibility at low costs. Through its content deals, careermosiac India pioneered the concept of “Media pays for employer” by entering into an arrangement of automotive upload advertisements from its media patterns on careermosiac India for a payment. Other international media tie-ups are on the anvil. This facility results in about 500 queries a week from readers in various parts of the world, which are religiously answered by the CCDC team.

Mr Muralidharan attributes the success of his products to the fact that employment or the lack of it has the single most important thing in life for people. As for the success of the “against the stream” concept of subscription based services he explains that people both in India as also in the developing countries spend a high proportion of their income on their children's education, and also because they are more professionals and fewer jobs. He believes the present model and the infrastructure can be easily scaled up, first to English speaking developing countries such as the Philippines and then to the other countries after incorporating a local language front-end. There is even a viable market for this service in developed countries- most notably the US- that have largest subsets of their general population which are willing to invest in their careers to advance.

Can we attribute any one reason for the success? “We think out-of-the-box and took the risk of failure,”
says Mr Muralidharan. The risk has led to a jump on to the next wave in the knowledge industry of information intermediation that will change the lives of thousands of people for the better.


 
 
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