BANGALORE: Protocol Telecom, a start up venturing into the space of telecom, convergence and networking solutions, has got $ four million in funding from private investors in the US. The company expects further investments from financial institutions during the course of the next calendar year. The company is privately held and its shareholders include its employees and promoters to the tune of 40 per cent while the rest is held by the investors and share holders.

The company will operate and offer solutions and services for the telecom and networking sector across the world. Close to acquiring a product development lab in the US, Protocol, has opened office in Mumbai and Delhi, while its head quartered in Bangalore. Future plans include opening six offices in Asia and a couple of offices in America by the end of the next calendar year. It expects its first year of operations ending December 2002, with a turnover of $15 million, globally.

Protocol's Founder and CEO Suresh Gundappa said, "The market demands cost effective leading edge technologies to be implemented by a good solution provider and Protocol brings in partnerships and skill sets from leading technology vendors to implement these solutions." Supplementing his statement, the company has partnered with Nortel Networks, Enterasys, Cincom, Dialogic (acquired by Intel), Checkpoint, Opentide, Altitude, Nice and Comverse to provide these solutions.

The company has sketched out its operational plans focussing on providing turnkey solutions for contact center and network infrastructure. The contact center solutions offers CRM, Business Intelligence, Call Center, Interactive Voice response, Computer Telephony Integration, Speech Recognition and multimedia enabled contact centers. Network infrastructure solutions encompass optical, wire line and wireless solutions.