Rajesh Jain founded thin client company Novatium Solutions has received an undisclosed amount of funding from venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA (NSDQ: ERTS)). Novatium is currently headquartered in and operating in Chennai, and the NEA investment will be used to help Novatium expand beyond Chennai. Krishna Kolluri, General Partner at NEA, and Ben Mathias, VP at NEA India, will join the board of Novatium. [via release]
At the TiEcon 2006, Novatium CEO Alok Singh had mentioned that they want to change the way people use the PC; make it more of an appliance like a toaster. Novatium tries to take the complexity out of computing and the cost of ownership of a computing device with a server based thin client – what one buys for around $100 (or rents for around $10 per month), is a client with screen and keyboard that connects to a centralized server (Star topology?) with the requisite software, Internet access, virus protection etc. Newsweek had an interesting feature on Novatium.
Seems nice, and Rajesh Jain has had a loooooong walk before being a successful entrepreneur. (And is a tremendous human being – some of his writings about childless couples are moving).
But why are we moving back in time?? First webaroo comes with a model which should have come in 95/96 and RJ is doing something which Sun had made a crusade with the NC (network computer) around 97. Rather that someone supports the one laptop perchild project.
And where is the target market? There are versions of a thin client that are operational now – anyone can build a couple of pcs which operate with one server.
Is this for the west (and people are no longer willing to go the extra distance to kill MSFT – and even then MSFT will just cut prices and you will have a non starter).
Is this for Africa and other developing countries? Better to have a something which runs independently rather be at the mercy of a network. Imagine if you had to make sure BSNL was up and running everytime u had to retrieve a document. (even the 1 laptop per child is an independent machine). And costs around 100 dollars too (at least was supposed to).
Or is RJ trying to play a larger role here – non profit Richard Stallman kind of machine. Diff to fly mate.
Or maybe I should just shutup cause I dont know much about what Novatium is trying to do – except what I Google up. :D