I-Flex Solutions Plans Asp Foray By Year End

I-Flex Solutions Ltd, formerly CITIL, will enter the ASP (application service provider) market by the end of this year.

R Ravisankar, chief executive officer, I-Flex, said the company was in a advanced talks for joint ventures in India and the Asia-Pacific.

"We are in talks with two players for entering the ASP market in India and the Asia-Pacific and at least one of them will be announced soon, and be operational within the year."

The company, he said, wanted the advantage of being the first player in the ASP market in its selected domain.

I-Flex has concentrated on the product segment of the market instead of the traditional Indian services model, and will be hitting the ASP route with its immensely successful Flexcube software package for the financial industry. Flexcube, within two years of its launch, has become the second most popular software in the world after Globus, developed by Temenos.

According to Ravisankar, with the number of people accessing the Internet going up every year, and the bandwidth getting better, not getting into the ASP mode of business would hurt I-Flex in the long term. "The traditional mode of licensing software will compete with the software on tap model," he said adding that the ASP model was a well proven model for small businesses.

Flexcube may prove to be a great success in the ASP market because of its flexibility. I-Flex has, according to Ravisankar, been able to offer different functionality on Flexcube due to the parameterisation that the package affords.

The company has opted to go in for a joint venture approach to enter the ASP market because it feels that while it has got domain expertise in the financial segment, expertise in segments like running data centres, back-office work of banks and processing and networking may be best looked after by its joint venture partners.

The company is also planning to expand its existing operations in the Latin American markets and has signed business partner agreements with two companies in Brazil and Argentina.

Working through business partners has proved extremely successful for the company and today has about 33 business partners spread over 68 countries.

Ravisankar said that I-Flex was not looking at introducing any new product into the market as the costs involved with brand building were high.