BodhTree scouts for investors

HYDERABAD: IT solutions company, BodhTree Solutions, based out of Hyderabad is eyeing external investors for further expansion of services. Informing this BodhTree CEO, Sanjiv Gupta added that the company also plans to double its revenues in the next 10-12 months.

Gupta said, "We are looking out for some prospective value investors to leverage our skill sets worldwide. We have ready to deploy tools, increasing demand for solutions we provide and all we need is some sound investments for demonstrating our capabilities."

The company is also planning to increase the manpower from the current 110 to over 250 in the next 12 months. According to Gupta, the company's latest solution ePaper for the print industry already has more than eight clients and the company expects to take this number to more than 20 by March 2005. Also, it has partnered with a Malaysian and Thailand company to reach out its solution in the Asia-Pacific region.

Adding further about the expansion plans, Gupta said, "Our digitization/archival suite is a flexible platform on which we have launched our ePaper solution. We are going to add few more verticals onto this platform constituting healthcare, documentation and patents. Pilot projects are already on and we have got a client in the healthcare vertical."

The company is expecting 33 percent of the total revenues from the digitization and ePaper solutions and the rest 67 percent form web services, data integration and data cleansing services.

BodhTree recently launched its ePaper Publishing Solution for the newspaper and magazine publishing houses. Keeping in view the largely ignored visually challenged subscribers, ePaper offers 'click-to-listen' feature on-the-fly text-to-speech technology allowing users to listen to the audio of news articles.

According to the company, it also allows newspapers to profile their subscriber base by tracking the latter's reading habits thereby, enhancing the publications audited circulation figures by leveraging the recent bylaws and rules of ABC that allows electronic edition to be accounted as sold edition. The solution also has options like Geo ads, a feature allowing newspapers to display location-based ads to its online subscribers. Besides, it also features animated ads, which facilitate animated ads on the regular newspaper layout, and ad retention.

"Currently most newspapers and magazines deliver news to online subscribers via their own websites, which fail to retain the original print layout that subscribers identify the newspaper with. This is where our solution scores over the conventional websites," said Gupta.

The solution is available both as a license fee-based approach, where the newspaper buys the license and deploys the solution by itself and through outsourced service model where BodhTree Consulting handles the entire process.