'We may go in for an initial public offer in two years'

Q&A/ SAI GUNDAVELLI

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Solix Technologies Inc, is a provider of enterprise data management solutions. With a presence in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, the company has its development centres located in Hyderabad and Secunderabad.

Solix has been in the enterprise data management space for the last five years and has made a revenue of $9 million. Sai Gundavelli, chief executive officer of Solix Technologies Inc, however, still calls it a start-up.

"We want to grow to be a leader in the enterprise data management space,"he adds. In an interview with Business Standard, Gundavelli spells out the future course of action for Solix Technologies. Excerpts:

How is Solix Technologies doing in the enterprise data management space at present?

Solix enables companies to achieve information lifecycle management. It automates enterprise data archiving, application migration and application upgradability so that performance, compliance and storage can be facilitated and storage cost can be optimised. At present, we have around 40 customers including LG, BPL and GE Plastics.

The enterprise data management market is around $100 million right now. By 2007, it is expected to grow to $4 billion, according to META Group/Gartner reports.

This means that in the next few years, there will be more data for enterprises to manage, with e-mail, applications and documents growing. We, therefore, expect to grow significantly in the coming years. We will be making some announcements on the client side shortly.

India has not been a major contributor to Solix Technologies' revenues. Do you see a market for your products in India in the future and if yes, how do you plan to tap it?

India has not been a major market for us so far. We, however, expect the APAC region to contribute to around 25 per cent of our revenues in the next two-three years from around five per cent at present.

We expect the banking and financial sectors besides the ITeS sector to be the major drivers. We are already in talks with a few prospective clients. We will also be announcing some strategic reseller partners in India soon, who will enable us to tap the market further.

Solix offers solutions like ARCHIVEjinni, UPGRADEjinni and MIGRATEjinni in the market. What are the new solutions that have been lined up for the coming years?

Our existing solutions will be offered on new platforms like SAP and PeopleSoft by the next quarter.

At present, they are offered on Oracle, custom applications and e-mail platforms. Besides, with Clause 49 in the offing, we will be launching a tool for compliance in the Indian market. This product is also likely to be released in the next quarter.

We are also working on an internal search engine. At present, all the available search engines are for public search.

Internal search means that a company can search for a specific data from all the documents that it has saved in an electronic format across all its centres. It will not just be a subject search but a text search facilitator. We may also tie-up with an existing public search engine in this regard.

What's the capital structure of the company and are there any plans to raise more funds?

Solix Technologies is a closely-held company. We are contemplating raising around $ 5 million through the venture capital route. We may also go in for an initial public offering in the next one or two years.

Solix has two development centres in Hyderabad and Secunderabad. What has been the investment so far and are there any plans for further expansion?

We have invested around $5 million in R&D alone in India. Our development centres in India employ more than 200 people out of the 300 worldwide. We plan to restrict our development activity to Hyderabad and Secunderabad only.

Therefore, we will be doubling our people strength here within a year's time.

Are you looking at expanding your international presence and if yes, what will be the route?

We are looking at Japan, China, Middle East, Brazil, Mexico and Canada. We plan to enter these regions through the partnership route.