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AskMe bags Novartis business

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CIOL Bureau
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Pratima Harigunani

PUNE: AskMe Corporation, a Bellevue, US-based expertise management software solutions company with operations in Pune, has added Novartis Pharmaceuticals to its kitty.

The size of the contract could not be immediately estimated, but Anil Kumar, general manager, AskMe Corporation pegs it as a significant recent client win.

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"Novartis is planning to use AskMe Enterprise for connecting scientists in their R&D units spread across different countries in Switzerland, USA and others."

He added that in future, business expansion would be on two areas. "We would target additional knowledge worker groups such as sales division besides deeper integration into business processes activities in existing groups like R&D where knowledge management software is integrated into their standard operating procedures."

The company plans to build new "Business Process Modules" or BPMs for its expansion strategy. "The initial investment this year alone will be more than $2 million," he said.

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AskMe has recently added a new division in addition to its existing facility in Pune. "We are now developing our most recent product release completely made out of India. There are very few companies doing end-to-end core product development of the kind churned by Google, Yahoo, Autonomy, etc. where new products are being conceptualized, designed, developed and deployed. We are doing all these types of activities at AskMe India."

Its most recent software release, codenamed AskMe Enterprise "Azo" has been developed by the India team. "Starting with concept phase where senior engineers, program managers and business analysts understand market needs, and competition to creating marketing requirements; it was designed here in terms of architecture, scalability and software development. I can say this product has true "Made in India" logo on it and used some of the latest technologies called Web 2.0 such as XSL and AJAX on .Net platform." Kumar point out.

"I think there is a large untapped market for providing high-end upstream services as well as end-to-end product development services out of India," he added.

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The company works in two divisions: AskMe Enterprise product that contributes about two-thirds of the revenue and the Product Development Services (PDS) division that is growing at a very rapid pace, faster than the AskMe division. AskMe will be in a large scale hiring mode and plans to quadruple its employee strength in the next 12 months, from the current 50.

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