Deep inelastic scattering at HERA and the BFKL pomeron

We present a BFKL phenomenology of structure functions in the framework of the generalized BFKL equation for the dipole cross section proposed by us recently. We show that the HERA measurements of excitation of charm at $Q^{2} \lsim $10 GeV$^{2}$ allow determination of the intercept of the BFKL pomeron. A comparison with the experimental data suggests a large contribution from the nonperturbative cross section for colour dipoles of large size $r$.