BANGALORE: Microland, a pure play remote infrastructure management services (IMS) company, based out of Bangalore, plans to open a new facility in May 2005 at Electronic city. The facility will house 250 engineers. The expansion will be fuelled by the recent $7.3 million funding received from JP Morgan Chase, ICICI Venture, Synnex Corporation, with Pradeep Kar as its promoter.

The company's chairman and MD Pradeep Kar said, "We currently have 1100 employees and the expansion will involve headcount increase of 250 people. We had also set up a disaster recovery center in Chennai recently, " he said.

Microland has had to reinvent itself thrice according to the ups and downs of the Indian IT industry - moving from networking hardware business in the 90s to becoming an Internet player during the dotcom boom and subsequently settling itself in the comfortable niche of IT infrastructure management. "We are currently in version 3.0 which started two years ago," said Kar, referring to the company's new avatar.

He informed that the company is cruising along comfortably in its chosen focus space. "From zero percent international business, we now have 75 percent of our business coming in from international clients. We also manage the infrastructure of 26 BPO companies in India," he said.

While Kar declined to reveal the revenue figures, he said that the company is debt free and has witnessed 15 consecutive quarters of growth. He added that the recent move to sell part of Microland's holding in Planetasia to US based Global Consultants Inc. (GCI) formed part of the strategy to focus more on IMS. GCI is currently the largest shareholder in Planetasia with a 60 percent stake. However, Microland still has a stake in the company with Kar being the chairman.

When asked if he considered expanding the company's operations outside Bangalore, Kar said that he is not averse to the idea of having a center in Mysore.