Advertisment

Restructured BFL to focus more on e-commerce

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

By Srinivas R and Latha Kuttappan-Chandradeep

Advertisment

BANGALORE: After taking over the charge as the Managing Director of BFL

Software on October 27, 1999, R. Mohan, is re-structuring the company by

focusing more on systems and embedded applications, e-commerce and IT enabled

services. In his words, "BFL wants to serve the customer in all areas--from

services to solutions. We are looking for partners in both solution and business

aspects in places where BFL does not have a presence." While this is on,

BFL’s top management too will take on a new look–a look which would

encourage participative management.

In the area of e-commerce, BFL has plans to bring `Pay Stream' and `Agora' as

its two new web products. While Pay Stream is a bill payment software,

Agora--market place is Greek–is an application that allows Web-based companies

to set up a shopping mall. It has already managed to get a Malaysian company as

its first customer for pay Stream. Though BFL is yet to decide on the pricing of

Agora–it will be very competitive though keeping in mind the industry

standards–it will be based on the platforms and hardware configuration used to

set up the online shopping mall facility. Given the phenomenal growth of

business-to-consumer e-commerce market, Agora will be targeted at the US and

Canada, Europe, South-East Asia and the Indian Sub-Continent.

Plagued by poor performance in the first two quarter of 1999-2000, BFL is

expecting to end the year with a growth of 25 percent, which is way below the

industry standard of over 50 percent. However, it is a situation that is quickly

being rectified by Mohan and team. It has put in place a two-pronged strategy.

The first is to increase personnel in the international sales team for specific

accounts and building customer relationships. The second is to focus on building

domain expertise in the areas of healthcare, insurance and customer delivery

systems besides developing technology expertise in embedded systems, the

Internet and object oriented technologies. In the coming year, a special thrust

would be given to IT Enabled Services.

BFL had earlier launched web kiosks in the market and to date has sold 34

copies of 34 copies of netKIOS software and 800 copies of netCLIENT software

worldwide. While netKIOS software, the central server software, was sold for

between US$20,000 and US$25,000, the netCLIENT software was priced at US$350 per

piece.

tech-news