D21 has been leveraging the Net extensively to serve as the information hub for art and healthfreaks. Express computer takes a look at the company’s IT strategies

Set up by three young entrepreneurs, Data 2 Information (D2I) offers extensive online services to its clients in the field of health and art. The services span customer requirements ranging from online health encyclopaedias to informative guides for the uninitiated, especially those who want to buy good art. Says Kumar Dasgupta, one of the three founders of D2I, “We were clear that our core focus would always be on the customer. We therefore wanted to create sites that would enhance customer experience.” This translated into sites that use highly interactive search tools allowing the user the ability to customise available information according to preference.

D2I had initially planned on using either NT or Unix for their operating system together with DB2 UDB for their database requirements, and ‘IBM presented a one-stop solution for both our hardware and software requirements,’ explains Dasgupta, elaborating why the company chose IBM as its vendor. Later on, D2I decided to switch from NT to AIX as its operating system, as according to it, AIX was more robust than NT and better suited for Web applications. Net.Commerce Pro was the software of choice for D2I. Dasgupta says, “It is an extremely affordable solution, offering good value for money, in addition to being able to meet all our requirements.”

The Health site, www.check4health.com, includes features such as ‘My Health Record’, a format developed to help users maintain an online record of personal health. As part of its value-added offerings to users, D2I has tied up with a host of doctors from various disciplines and Net-enabled them, so that users can consult any of these doctors at the click of a mouse. This panel of doctors is also available for answering questions on specific health areas online.

The second site, www.indiancanvas.com, offers content designed to generate awareness about good art among laymen who want to collect the same. “Our mission,” says Dasgupta, “is to help visitors to the site make educated choices about the art they buy.” In keeping with D2I’s philosophy of dispensing information through data, this site too is intended to brim over with information about art and artifacts, for that matter everything connected to the world of Indian art. To sustain this flow of information, the company is contemplating tie-ups with domain experts, registered universities that teach art as a subject, a channel of art galleries and dealers of folk and tribal art.

Apart from information, the site will also boast of the auction feature. This will be a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) service, facilitated by D2I. Dasgupta believes that a back-end brick-and-mortar setup will be necessary for D2I to be able to authenticate and control the quality of items being placed for auction online.

IBM’s business partner, Web Development Corporation (WDC) has been handling the design and implementation of both sites, on which the company has spent nearly a million dollars. Says Dasgupta, “We expect the health site to break even in the third year of operations, while the art site should do so by the second year itself.” As these are B2C sites, revenue generation will be chiefly through three channels, the primary one being banner ads.

The secondary revenue channel will be B2C e-commerce transacted through these sites.