By Srinivas R and Latha Kuttappan-Chandradeep
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.