"We would like to have partners, mainly SIs, who can be a part of the company starting form identification of colleges to after-sales to spread our wings. We would also look forward for association with hardware vendors and system builders for bundling the software along with the products," said R Kothandaraman, MD, Locus Technologies.

The company already enjoys the partnership with Wipro Infotech for the past two years, whose enterprise service division is currently acting as the SI for the product on a non- exclusive basis.

Edumanage is the ERP solution that helps the educational institutions to e-govern the total administration. Claiming that only three to five percent of the educational institutions are automated in the country, Kothandaraman said that there is strong demand for such solutions, which could bring complete transparency and governance in the administration of the educational institution.

The ERP solution has more than 18 modules including the basic modules of educational institutions such as campus management, department management, admission management, student management and staff management. Locus provides five basic modules to the institutions and the other modules are being provided on their requirements.

The ERP also has a subsystem called Exam Care to manage the process of examination in the universities. The product has been completely developed on the open source front is a platform independent one.

"A product selling to the clients shouldn't have a running cost and that was the primary reason for the development of this product on open source technology tools. The other benefits of the product is that it is hundred percent secured and could reduce the operational cost of the institutions by 200-300 percent," he informed.

Locus is planning to tie-up with five business partners before the end of this FY and would increase the numbers considerably according to the success of the partnerships.

On looking for partnerships at this point of time, where the economic scenario is bad, Kothandaraman said that the prime idea of the company to venture into this solution was to ensure that the product doesn't get affected due to any reasons like recession.

"The education segment is one that doesn't get affected due to any reasons. The company has done installations in many leading universities and educational institutions across the country like MTNL-CETTM (Mumbai), Islamic University (Kashmir), Mangalore University, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University to name a few and expects another 50 more deployments in next two years as the demand for such a product as been felt by the educational institutions and universities," said B Ramachandran, Senior Consultant—Business and Projects, Locus Technologies.

Locus Technologies will handhold the partners, train the customers and business partners in terms of installations and after-sales support for an indefinite period according to the need of the business partners.