Monday, July 1, 2002		Feature

IT happens in Bangalore
Soundara Rajan N.S.

SIMPUTER that received raving reviews - The New York Times hailed it as the most significant technological innovation of the period and the IT Ministry awarded it the first Dewang Mehta Award - is all set to go places, literally. The developers of Simputer, encouraged by the response received from Chattisgarh, where it has been deplloyed in educational projects, are working out newer applications. These would be in the field of rural health support (checking the health of mothers and foetus), telemedicine, micro-banking; information-retrieval, filing of FIRs, land-records, meter reading, e-governance, and ticket-collection.

Enterprises all over the world are IT- enabling their security issues. The security market is offering a huge potential which many firms in India want to tap. One of them is Prudente Solution, a start-up company that specialises in security testing services.

The opening of the Internet telephony would soon enable voice services through cable. Alopa, a cable telephony solutions provider, based in Bangalore, wants to enable voice service through cable operators. The proliferation of cable network in India is eminently suitable for Alopa's designs.

"Easy HMS", a software solution for hospital management, from Infolife, is about to be launched, formally. Over the last two years, the company has been implementing this product in several hospitals. Now, Infolife is ready to enter the international market and is planning its foray in the middle east.

ADC, the $2 billion broadband access solutions provider, is setting up a testing lab in Bangalore. This is scheduled to commence operations in August this year. According to Michael Day, CTO, ADC Technology Development, the business would soon be expanded by bringing more projects to India.

While ADC invested in India to expand its business, Wipro has inaugurated a Design center for embedded solutions at Kiel in Germany. This center would cater to the needs of customers in Germany and Scandinavia which are emerging markets in northern Europe.

Wipro also recently launched another service, a IT consulting services for India, the Asia Pacific and the Middle East areas. Kshema Technologies has announced a new and welcome initiative. It has launched the "Kshema Software Architect Forum', aimed to imbibe the best and innovative practices in the IT industry. The I-flex solutions has been awarded 'Excellence in Electronics 2001 award by the Government of India. The company has also bagged the second place in the area of Computer Softwarefor the same year and this was based on its export performance over the last three years.

A first win for the dotcom? It could well be with the break-even achieved by indiamarkets.com, in the fourth quarter of the last financial year. According to Mr.Rohan Ajila, CEO, IMO Communications, the promoter of indiamarkets.com the company could possibly be the only one in the B2B business model to have broken even.

Bangalore continues to be the Hot Destination, not withstanding the IT slowdown in the last couple of years. In the year 2001, according to STPI, 110 software companies were registered here and out of these 60 percent were 100 percent foreign equity companies. Good news for the job aspirants here at Bangalore, the employment opportunities are getting better, particularly in the ITES field. CustomerAsset has plans to hire 1,500 people, in the next three months. In July '02 alone, the company is planning to hire 700 persons.