Pioneers in the rugged PC hardware, Dynalog India has now embarked upon an aggressive marketing strategy. Shrikant Wadekar, business development manager, Dynalog India, spoke to Chitra Padmanabhan about their tie-up with Moxa Technologies

Could you elaborate on the nature of your tie-up with Moxa Technologies?
Dynalog India was the first company to launch Industrial PCs in India through its principal technology partner, Advantech. Lately, there has been a sharp rise in the demand for rugged PC hardware in India due to various factors like the call centre revolution and the need for advanced defence equipment. Being an experienced player in this space, we have now tied up with Moxa Technologies, which also deals in rugged industrial hardware. We plan to leverage on the technical expertise of the company and make significant in-roads in the Indian market.

What is the speciality of rugged PCs as compared to normal office PCs?
Rugged Industrial PCs are specifically designed to be used in harsh conditions. For instance, the temperature in shop floors of factories is extremely high and PCs there require advanced withstanding capabilities. On the other hand, in a customer-centric market 24x7 service has become the norm. Unlike normal PCs, Industrial PCs in call centres provide adequate redundancies in the event of failure of a system. Moreover, there is a significant difference in the marketing of these products. The marketing team requires a high level of technical capability and an advanced knowledge of the core functionality of the products. That is precisely the reason for our tie-up with Moxa Technologies. Moxa has a wide suite of network and communication hardware devices, which would further enhance our positioning in the Industrial PC space.

How would you position yourself in the midst of established players like Cisco or Tata Telecom?
Admittedly, Cisco is among the leading players in the networking and data communications space. But we, as partners of Moxa Technologies, would position ourselves as the subset of the market for data communication devices because we have an entirely different product line. We want to specialise in Industrial PCs, which have wide usage. Our clients leverage our Industrial PC products for their ruggedness and redundancies. For instance, the call centre industry is essentially based around a voice-based activity and use of equipment for long hours is vital for this type of business. The use of Industrial PCs in this segment is to facilitate and withstand an uninterrupted flow of activity. Due to the customer-centric nature of the business, equipment is provided with redundancies, so that work is not brought to a grinding halt in case the system fails. The PCs are designed in such a way that most switches are duplicated, and thus the PC resumes work on its own, in turn informing the user about the replacement of the original hardware.

What are the other areas where Industrial PCs are used widely?
Industrial PCs are now being widely used in Railway Reservation Information System that can retrieve reservation data of 61 days of the respective train. This system has already been deployed in Indian Railways in certain key divisions. Hydraulics and other branches of engineering colleges widely use Industrial PCs for experiments.

Withstanding environmental extremes like dust, temperature, vibration, shock and electro-magnetic interference are some of the few basic uses of PCs used in the education segment.