Adgully Exclusive | Early jump-start and still going strong: Directi's Bhavin Turakhia

Directi was established in the year 1998 and has been the forerunner in India in the space of web products offering. The company's current product profile includes Communication and Collaboration apps, Social Networking software, Instant messaging, Context Analysis Engines, Antispam and Antivirus Solutions, Large scale Billing and Provisioning platforms, Traffic Monetization Solutions, Online Advertising Solutions, DNS Management Products, Linux and Windows Server Management Software, Web Hosting Control Panels, etc.

Since its inception the company has seen tremendous growth and as 'digital' becomes the buzzword for India it will be interesting to track the growth path of this 300+ million dollar business. Adgully caught up with Bhavin Turakhia, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Directi Group, to find out more about his plans for the company.

Talking about the competition across the digital space and about Directi's leader position in it, Turakhia says, "The potential for growth in the domain registration industry is tremendous, with Indian businesses getting ready to explore a whole new business dimension in the online space. The web space, thereby, presents immense opportunities to capture the direct to customer channel, where no single large player has emerged so far. The Indian web-presence and hosting industry is pegged at $100 Million. At Directi, our endeavor has always been on creating mass market internet products that can be used by a global client base. We already have more than 5 million customers on our platform that was completely built in house and changed the way the domain industry worked."

"Our platform powers not only clients but also other domain registrars and even competitors. It made possible for even small resellers to start a web business with just an investment of Rs.10,000/- We have not stopped at that and are on our way to create collaboration tools of the type that no registrar has ever offered its clients. Directi is the largest domain registrar not only in India but also in Asia and in India we lead by a huge margin and have 85% market share," he adds.

Turakhia says that the internet industry in India is at a very nascent stage and needs a lot of push and thrust in the right direction. "As per Nasscom, the technology product development industry in India is pegged to be $12 billion by 2015. This is miniscule compared to the success that has been witnessed by IT services. While product development is picking up, it yet needs a lot of push in the right direction," he adds.

While signing off we ask him what is his roadmap for the company going forward, he says, "From a 5 year perspective we are in the process of rapidly expanding the scope of our web presence businesses. Being the largest domain registrar in Asia, we are now eyeing considerable market shares in related businesses like web hosting. We are also expanding our web products portfolio. New market penetration is very high on the agenda along with consolidating our presence in existing markets especially North America & Europe. Our vision is based on the Internet wave. The ability to transmit information at a ZERO cost opens up possibilities that never existed before." | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]