Aftek floats smart home solutions arm

Enthused by the response from the realty players as well as home buyers to the concept of intelligent homes, the promoters of Aftek Infosys have floated a separate company to market and offer services and manufacture the hardware that goes into a digital home system.

Christened Digihome Solutions, the company has set up a plant in Solan district of Himachal Pradesh, said sources. The 'intelligent home solution' developed by Aftek is a combination of hardware and software, and the manufacturing and assembly of hardware will be done at Digihome factory in Solan, said Chandrashekhar Raje, vice-president (technology solutions) at Aftek Infosys.

"Digihome will manufacture everything other than the imported components such as cameras and chips," Raje said. He informed that the trial production has been started at the Digihome plant and the production might be scaled up by August.

He, however, declined to spell out the quantum of investment made in the Solan plant. "A few crore for sure," he said, adding the investment might be ramped up soon after the commencement of regular production.

The first fully integrated intelligent home project in the country - Wonder Futura - was likely to become operational by June, and the company had two more such projects in Bangalore, he added.

The smart solution developed by Aftek integrates the safety, security, automation, control, entertainment and communication aspects. Though there are players in the world who offer these functionalities in homes in isolated manner, Aftek was the first to integrate them, Raje said.

Aftek promoters "� Ranjit Dhuru, Ashutosh Humnabadkar, Mahesh Vaidya, Ravindra Malekar, Sandeep Save, Charuhas Khopkar, Sunil Desai, Mukul Dalal, Promod Broota and Nitin Shukla "� together held 75 per cent of the equity in Digihome, whereas Aftek Infosys retained the remaining 25 per cent, said Mahesh Vaidya, chief technology officer.

According to the scheme of things governing the relationship between Aftek and Digihome, the former developed the solution and passed it on to Digihome for marketing and after- sales service. All the modifications, further development or newer versions will be the responsibility of Aftek. It will receive development fee as well as royalty on per project basis from Digihome.

The company now has in hand business worth Rs 30 crore and expected it to jump to Rs 300 crore in two years, said Vaidya.

"We are looking at major opportunities in the Indian real estate sector as well as in the overseas markets, mainly in West Asia and the US," he added.

The company was also in the process of creating retrofit option of the solution for the properties already constructed, Raje informed. He further clarified that retrofitting could be done only in modules as the integrated solution needed to be built into the construction and engineering design of a structure.