BANGALORE: Mindtree Consulting, a global business solutions consulting company and iPlanet, a Sun and Netscape alliance company, have tied-up to offer Enterprise Application solutions for the global market.

According to the tie-up, Mindtree will develop applications on the iPlanet framework to deliver cost effective solutions. Mindtree is the fourth company in India to tie-up with iPlanet after TCS, Wipro Infotech and Accel.

Speaking about the way it would address the market, Carol Stevenson, senior director, partner sales & strategic accounts, Asia Pacific, iPlanet, said "We work in synergy with our partners and support the marketing as well as the development activities."

"We are a consulting company and we are technology agnostic. But what differentiates us from other companies is that we don't just tell the customer to take his pick. We do a business process study and depending on the requirements of the customer, we are strongly prescriptive," said Jayesh Chakravarthi, vice president and head India business, Mindtree Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

Mindtree Consulting is shifting its focus from the ebiz space to the enterprise space. "We are now a full fledged enterprise solutions provider," said Jayesh. He also said that Mindtree Labs had been evaluating the iPlanet framework for the past few months, it has built a competency in it and is now ready to go to the market with solutions.

Stevenson of iPlanet said the two companies had great synergies, specially in the verticals they both addressed: the government, telco and financial services. Mindtree has had one large telco customer Lucent and has done server to server authentication work for HDFC. As far as the government sector is concerned, "we have no wins to report there as yet," said Jayesh, "though the process is on."

Mindtree's other customers include HLL, Hindustan Times, the National Stock Exchange, ABB and Godrej.
Stevenson said iPlanet's Go to Market strategy is an indirect model where it goes to the market through its partners only. As such, the two companies would have joint marketing strategies for their iPlanet offerings.