Netting gains by managing the Net

SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES TECHNOLOGY

What is the net effect of Net usage on the net profit of a company?

While internet has become an integral business tool for almost all the companies, studies show that small and medium enterprises lose a considerable amount of time, money, bandwidth and productive official time due to indiscriminate use of the internet by employees.

This statistics highlight the importance of a structured mailing solution for the small and medium enterprises, where investments are kept to the lowest and cost saving becomes a critical aspect of sustaining the business, says QuantumLink Communications, a Mumbai-based internet technology company.

Take the case of an enterprise that employs 35 people in three locations in the country and has deployed 35 machines for official use.

In normal course, the company, which uses a dial-up connection, gets up to 400 e-mails a day. Internet is key to their business as they have to keep constantly in touch with their customers and communicate within the regional offices of the company.

All the instances of official communication need to be archived in the main system and this makes the reporting protocol more complicated.

On a normal working day, each user spends eight hours in the office. Of this, archiving the communications and receiving and replying to official mail takes 30 minutes.

It is estimated that dealing with spam takes 20 minutes. The employee spends around 25 minutes browsing at various intervals during the office hours and deleting and dealing with virus takes five minutes.

So, an employee spends 80 minutes dealing with work that is unproductive for the company, says QuantumLink.

QuantumLink's flagship internet security and mailing solution, PostMaster, offers to enhance internet productivity. The product has two versions "" Express and Enterprise.

Says Sharad Popli, co-founder and director (technology), of QuantumLink, "Over the years, the internet, particularly e-mail, has become an integral part of our lives. Our flagship product, PostMaster, was launched in 1998 and it has a base of over 3,000 customers. The product significantly enhances Internet productivity."

Ajit Menon, co-founder and director (sales and marketing), QuantumLink, said, "PostMaster is the second-largest selling Indian software after Tally in India. We are in the process of expanding our reach into newer territories both in India as well as overseas. We are looking out to appoint dealers in the Eastern and Northern regions of India."

Network performance decreases by non-business related graphic files, streaming media and games downloaded by employees, says Cyberoam, an employee internet management company. Mails send by employees can push the employer into legal hazards. If the mails contain something objectionable, the company can also be dragged to court for its employee's act.

Studies says implementing a company internet policy can help raise profits by 15 per cent.

Assuming that an average working day is 8 hours and the average per-hour salary of an employee is Rs 80, the unproductive cost to the company for the 80 minutes that the employee spends on internet is about Rs 96.

For 35 employees, it comes to almost a lakh a month.

"Cyberoam is a complete software solution for internet management. It provides a corporate mailing solution, network security and opitmises internet resources," Shalin Patel, marketing manager, Cyberoam, said.

"Our system allows the company to set access levels for each employee. Each staff member can be allotted a particular time for surfing and can be allocated a particular bandwidth," Patel said. "Educational institutions are more prone to serious internet misuse by students. We offer packages to check this," he said.

"There are multitudes of sites providing window shopping and free surfing which directly leads to wastage of office time and bandwidth. Researches say 30 to 40 per cent of surfing is done during business hours and are non-business related. More than 60 per cent of online purchases are during the office hours," the company said.

"The corporates and smaller companies in India are becoming increasingly aware of the hit their earnings take due to misuse of internet. They are eager to install Net management systems. The market for the solution is growing at a faster pace," Patel said.

QuantumLink Communications said its PostMaster solution solves the problems at one go. The PostMaster Express, AvAc antivirus solution and PostMaster antispam called 'GatePass' are effective in securing a company's network, the company said.

At a one-time cost of Rs 31,500 and an annual cost of 6,000 for installing and maintaining the Net management system, an enterprise can get rid of a recurring loss of Rs 13.26 lakh, the company said.