Escosoft Ties Up With Swedish Companies

Escosoft, the wholly owned subsidiary of Escorts Ltd, has entered into strategic alliance with Sweden based Industrial Financial Systems (IFS) and IIS Infotech, the Indian representative of IFS to develop and market component based enterprise solutions with e-business capabilities.

Addressing the Press conference here today, Escosoft's director Nikhil Nanda said that under the alliance, a competency centre would be set up at a cost of Rs 20 crore. Though the investment detail is yet to be worked out, all the three partners are expected to participate in the competency centre. The new centre will start functioning by the April-end, he added. Escosoft had earlier entered into 50:50 joint venture with US based Computer Associates (CAs) to develop telecom and healthcare softwares. Nanda said the Escort is seriously looking at entering the services sector and expanding from its present base in the telecom industry. He said this was the age of convergence and the company was open for joint ventures and angel investors. Escorts would also venture into providing web application protocol services on telephones, since the future does not lie in computers but in web telephony.

 

Refusing to comment on the companies with which Escorts would enter into partnerships, Nanda said talks were on and currently nothing had been finalised. Talks on forming joint-ventures are already in a very advanced stage and the partnerships will be announced by June," he added.

Nanda said that the company is looking at the venture funds as means of financing the second phase of investment. "The holding company (Escorts Ltd) will make investment only for the start up phase while in the second and subsequent round we are looking at the valuations side", he added.