Just Dial’s management has been talking about opportunities in “Search Plus” (hyperlocal transaction enablement) offerings for quite some time. Management has indicated difficulty in monetisation of Search Plus transactions. We also have concerns on monetisation of Search Plus, given the bandwidth necessary to manage a large number of offerings (over 25) and competition from several vertical specialist companies.
In the last couple of months, the focus seems to have shifted more towards its mini-ERP offering for small and medium sized merchants—JD Omni. JD Omni is synergistic in the sense that it targets the core classifieds business customer base (mid-to-small sized merchants) to a large extent. On the other hand, it represents a completely different business model for the company (a software product business vs the current listing services business). And the company’s ability to cope with this different business model has yet to be tested.
While there are several products
