Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

In Netcore, the period from last September to December was marked by many changes – both internal and external. We had a few senior members of our management team quit, and we had new regulations from TRAI which saw a sharp drop in the SMS business overnight resulting in immediate losses. Those were tough months [...]

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In Netcore, in the past, we have never managed to have sustained profitability for us to think beyond the quarter.  I have always wanted to create a situation where we have a solid base for today, and then can start looking at the future. I have believed that we have to make today’s business profitable [...]

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In Netcore, we have an external Advisory Board with whom we review business and plans every quarter. We typically do the next year’s plan review sometime in early March, so that gives time to the teams to also start planning ahead for the next year. This year, I decided to split our plans into what [...]

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As I write this on the last day of 2011, the Year is about to transition. A New Year is a good time to reflect on the recent past and think about the future. My life can be thought of as three compartments – business, some of the political change part, and the personal bits. [...]

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Netcore’s Business (Nov) Service Tax Change hurts Small, Growing Businesses (Oct) Ideas and Innovations as a Differentiator (Sep) The Right Question (Feb)

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Following a tradition from 2008, 2009 and 2010, in this last week of the year, I am giving links to what I think where some of my better posts. I have categorised them into five topics: Digital India, Entrepreneurship, Politics, Personal and General. Digital India Netcore’s Business (Nov) Presentation at eGov Conference (Oct) TRAI’s SMS [...]

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As I look ahead at Netcore, there are a number of areas that we will need to look at in the coming months. First, we need to strengthen our cloud offerings. As corporate email and collaboration shifts to the cloud, we have to be there. e-Interact is a step in that direction. Second, we have [...]

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Within Netcore, we have always spent some time on innovative efforts. For the most part, these haven’t worked out into something substantial, but there are many ideas which have come through our efforts, some of which have helped on the enterprise side of the business. The MyToday SMS services (free and paid) were one such [...]

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The third business in Netcore is mobility. In this, the primary focus has been around SMS, but in recent times, we have been working to widen the portfolio of services on offer to businesses. We had started with a consumer-centric SMS content service (MyToday SMS) about five years ago. We hoped to monetise the free [...]

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Netcore’s second business which is also linked with email is Email Marketing. We have two offerings: Emergic Mass Mail (EMM) and Affiliate Email Marketing. EMM is about providing a hosted platform for companies to send out and track emails at scale. The email lists are owned by the company – what Netcore offers is a [...]

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Once every couple years or so, I provide an overview of what Netcore, the company which I founded more than a decade ago and I run as Managing Director, does. With changing times, some elements of our business mix have changed. Much of what Netcore does has stayed as B2B (business-to-business). We have experimented with [...]

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As I look back at the past year, I can see it from two different angles – from the Netcore lens, and from the India lens. In Netcore, our enterprise business has grown well. Our focus has been on “profitable growth.” Ensuring continued profitability helps simplify decision-making and requires continuous adaptation in changing markets. It [...]

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From the first of my annual series written a year ago: Once every year, I turn the mirror inward to look at my life -on my birthday. It is that time of the year once again. The dominant theme for the past year was about NetCore, the company I run. I spent the better part [...]

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In NetCore, we have two clear priorities: to ensure that we maintain the momentum in the high growth enterprise segment, and to build a strong consumer business. The enterprise mailing and mobility business is now about execution. We have the products and solutions that companies want. We need to reach them and ensure we deliver [...]

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The big new thing that we did in 2010 at NetCore was a stronger focus on Consumers. While that was how we had begun our mobility business 3+ years ago, over the past couple years in our endeavour to ensure profitability, we had reduced focus on this. In 2010, we did two important things – [...]

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I can look back at 2010 along three dimensions – NetCore, Politics and Personal. Let me start with NetCore. 2010 was a year to build upon the positive momentum that we had in NetCore in our enterprise mailing and mobility businesses. These are out cash-generating businesses, and we needed to ensure that we sustained the [...]

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Last week, TRAI announced new rules for telemarketing in India in an effort to combat spam. I have written on this topic many times before, since NetCore is a key player in both the transactional and promotional SMS business (as part of our Digital, Real-Time Communications vertical). On the whole, the rules are a good [...]

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From a series I wrote a year ago on the challenges of being an entrepreneur: For me, every year as an entrepreneur is one to be savoured because of the learnings.  Just because I did something right in the past does not guarantee success in the future. Building a business is hard. There are moments [...]

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Once every year, I turn the mirror inward to look at my life -on my birthday. It is that time of the year once again. The dominant theme for the past year was about NetCore, the company I run. I spent the better part of the year focused on the business – more than I [...]

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Today is my 43rd birthday. I will write next week about my journey from 42 to 43. For now, here is the last post from my 41 to 42 series: As I look ahead to the 43rd year of my life, there are many things I would like to make happen. I don’t know how [...]

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