  In 1994 Zakharov and the present authors argued that in color dipole (CD)
BFKL approach to DIS excitation of open charm at moderately large Q2 is
dominated by hard BFKL exchange. In view of the rapid accumulation of the
experimental data on small-x charm structure function of the proton F2cc from
HERA, we subject the issue of dominance of the rightmost hard BFKL pole
exchange to further scrutiny. Based on CD BFKL-Regge factorization we report
parameter-free predictions for the charm structure function F2cc and show that
the background to the dominant rightmost hard BFKL exchange from subleading
hard BFKL and soft-pomeron exchanges is negligible small from real
photo-production to DIS at Q2 lsim 50-100 GeV2. The agreement with the
experiment is good and lends strong support for the intercept of the rightmost
hard BFKL pole DeltaPom=alphaPom-1=0.4 as found in 1994 in the color dipole
approach. We comment on the related determination of DeltaPom from the
x-dependence of the longitudinal structure function FL(x,Q2) and of the scaling
violation dF2/dlog Q2 taken at a suitable value of Q2. \

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology