EVER sent an email message to a company and not got a reply? Ever read an email message sent to your company and done nothing about it?
New email software called FocalScope might please those who often find themselves in the first situation - and put off those who find themselves in the second.
Developed by homegrown Lantone Information Systems, FocalScope could change the way companies handle email messages.
"We looked at the email system and identified deficiencies in it," says Lantone founder Sandeep Singhania. "We've tried to correct them."
To be launched here in March or April, web-based FocalScope is already being used by companies in Japan.
What it does is break down email messages from different clients into groups called ticket boxes, and assigns them to people in charge of these groups. Clients are no longer interacting with just an individual but with an entire company.
This means clients avoid the first scenario, because even if the employee serving them is on leave, someone else handling the group will take over.
And everything that goes on in a ticket box is threaded. Which means there is no way an employee can "sit on" an email message because anyone in the company can see all the correspondence between the company and its clients.
Supervisors will know if their subordinates have read an email message, for how long they read it and whether they responded.
Web-based FocalScope also eliminates the problem of cluttered inboxes. "Email is nothing more than a call for action," says Mr Sandeep. "You can treat it like a task. Once you're finished with the task, you just close it. It does not need to be in your inbox any more."
So a FocalScope ticket box is sent to an archive once a case is closed.
Another feature of the software is that it integrates email messages with telephony. Employees can dial a contact number that appears in an email message by right-clicking on it.
Indeed, system integration is very much the core business of Lantone.
Started in 2005 by Mr Sandeep, who dropped out from an IT course, Lantone derived its name by combining "local area network (LAN)" and "telephone tones".
"A little network cable" is incorporated in the company's logo.
Why did Mr Sandeep set up Lantone?
"I really think things can be done better," he says. "I've always been on my own. Never been employed by anyone. I read a lot. I think a lot. And I see a lot of areas where we can do better or implement things better than they are done now."
He keeps a list of many things he believes can be done better - and it keeps growing.
Continually on the lookout for opportunities, he looks at his list for the next project once he is finished with one.
Mr Sandeep, who was inspired partly by his parents, who are in the trading industry, started coming up with IT solutions when he was in junior college. Since then, he has come up with "three or four major products".
One is mailtracking.com, which allows a person to track how many times their email message was opened by the recipient and how much time was spent reading it.
What is Mr Sandeep's business strategy?
"We offer more features dollar for dollar," he says.
Besides offering more features, Lantone also has an "open book" policy.
"Even as a small company, we have a lot of medium-sized customers and have been working with them for many years," says Mr Sandeep. "We felt an open book policy is the best way to bring the relationship forward, where the customer is allowed to audit our books."
He is confident about his company.
"We are positioning ourselves to compete with the bigger guys and have a track record to prove it," he says, referring to Lantone's success with Asterisk VoIP, a telephone system that incorporates Voice-over Internet Protocol with advanced facilities such as call recording and call logging.
Lantone took the third-party open-source application and customised it. "Our strength lies in how we can unify everything that is in there into a single system that can be marketed," says Mr Sandeep.
With Asterisk, Lantone went head-on with the likes of Cisco, Avaya and Nortel to clinch large deals with multi-national companies.
"Griffin (Marine Travel), for instance, whole of Asia, we handle it for them. We took that deal away from Cisco, basically," says Mr Sandeep.
Lantone has identified convergence and unified messaging as the biggest areas in which the IT industry can grow.
"We are poised to tap those areas," says Mr Sandeep, who has been in the system integration business for 10 years.
The biggest challenge in being in the IT industry is managing change, he says. "The industry moves so quickly. Human resources are a big problem. Training and retraining, rescaling, basically, of people. That's the challenge. The only way to attract these people is to give them something really interesting to do, to give them a stake in what we are doing.
"What we are doing with our latest technology has never been done before. We firmly believe it is going to change the way emails are handled. The team believes that, so the team sticks together."
Besides concentrating on FocalScope, Lantone is looking to set up an office in Vietnam to add to its branch in Russia.
Not bad for a company that started with just $100.
"I firmly believe that you don't really need a lot of money to do something," says Mr Sandeep. "You don't need it to start off."
