Holool to set up Rs100cr unit in Hyd

Company's Global business delivery centre to come up in four to five years

City-based Holool India Limited, a leading enterprise applications developer using Microsoft.Net, J2EE and Versata technologies, is planning to set up a global business delivery centre in the city at a cost of around Rs 100 crore.

It has also decided to ramp up its head count to about 220 during the current fiscal, from the existing 101.

Speaking to Business Standard, Mohammed Shams Qamar, managing director of Holool India, said: "We are planning to set up a global business delivery centre at an estimated cost of Rs 80-100 crore in Hyderabad. The centre will have emerging technologies, industry best practices, R&D, test labs and IT enabled services under one roof. It will come up in four to five years. With the offshore product marketing plans in the pipeline, we are also planning to ramp up our head count to about 220 from the existing 101 by the end of this financial year."

Holool recorded a turnover of Rs 2.6 crore in 2003-04. Qamar said that the company is expected to achieve Rs 8-10 crore turnover this fiscal with the launch of new products and projects.

Following a good response to its end-to-end extended enterprise solution "� eXensys "� in the Gulf region, Holool is now training its eyes on the markets in China, Turkey and France.

The three-year-old company, formerly Holool e-Business Private Limited, is at present developing eXensys in Chinese, Turkish and French languages. It is slated to enter into a joint venture with a leading company in China next month.

According to Shams, in a bid to establish eXensys as a leading ERP product in the second level products segment, Holool is in the process of identifying niche markets abroad.

"China, Turkey and some French-speaking countries have significant potential for ERP applications and hence we have decided to enter these markets. Negotiations were on with one of the leading companies in China, and we are likely to enter into a joint venture next month," he said.

eXensys is a modular enterprise resource planning (ERP) application built on the Microsoft.Net technology which automates the business processes according to business demands.

eXensys, which at present is available in Arabic and English languages, is being used by three clients in Saudi Arabia. It is the first Indian ERP product on Microsoft.Net to be marketed globally.

Holool's other products include SellActiv, a suite of enterprise software built on Versata Logic Suite using J2EE, which incorporates a future-proof architecture and has the flexibility to integrate with emerging and future applications, and Task-Base, an enterprise-level knowledge management application that tracks and analyses tasks and decisions at various levels of hierarchy within a department and across the enterprise.

At present, Holool has nine channel partners and branch offices for offshore marketing. As part of expanding its product reach, th company is now planning to add around 30 more channel partners by the end of 2005.

"To beef up the marketing of our product portfolio, we are also planning to set up two marketing offices "� one each in the US and the UK "� with a total investment of $1.5 million by March, 2005," Shams said.

To build a tightly-aligned team of channel partners, Holool is also developing Mpower, a task management portal, through which the activities of the channel partners can be monitored. The portal will be launched in the first of quarter of 2005.

Holool India Limited, which received a DNV ISO: 9001/2000 certification in 2002, is also slated to achieve SEI CMM Level-5 certification by June 2005.