Intelligroup unveils Offstar

Nandita Singh

HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad-based Intelligroup Asia is all set to launch its first product Offstar (Off*) today at Sapphire 2003 in Orlando, Florida. "Offstar integrates SAP with MS Office in ways that have not even been imagined yet," claims Microsoft Regional Director at Intelligroup Abhishek Nigam who also heads the Offstar product development team.

"Its born out of the need to overcome obstacles such as lack of offline capability, complex GUIs and the difficult process of making everything web-enabled in the ERP environment," he said adding that Offstar allows the user to leverage the familiar interfaces provided by MS Office to perform business transactions and retrieve business data from ERP back-ends such as SAP.

According to Nigam, the smart client–result of the hard work put in by 15 people over a product cycle of about four months at Intelligroup facility in Hyderabad–significantly reduces the cost of end user training and increases flexibility in performing business tasks. Intelligroup also claims that Offstar can maximize the RoI of companies with large transaction volumes significantly. "By saving an average of three minutes per transaction with Offstar, an organization that runs approximately 200,000 transactions per year, can save up to $250,000 annually," says Nigam.

The saving estimates could make just about any business sit up and take notice given that the potential applications of this vertical are wide. Its features further leverage existing IT investments of an enterprise thus delivering rapid RoI. "With an ability to enter transactions and data offline, asynchronous mode for business transactions and better integration of suppliers, partners and disparate back-end systems Offstar allows an enterprise to harness all the power of an ERP system," elaborates Nigam.

But is the market ready for such a product? According to Intelligroup Associate Vice President for e-business Anand Ramakrishnan, who is currently in Florida for the product launch, "Right now there are at least 18,000 SAP customers and they are certainly our potential market."






In a telephonic interview with CNS, he also said that Intelligroup was in talks with two US pharmaceutical majors who have shown considerable interest in enabling Offstar in their enterprises. "Perhaps the major share of the market will come from those who are upgrading their ERP systems," he said adding that in India the first Offstar, also being marketed as a "pilot-in-a-box", would be implemented for a Hyderabad based pharmaceutical company.

Talking about the price for the new product the company’s COO M D S Bosco said that while the product would be priced at $5,000 for the server and $100 per user license in the US market, it would cost Rs 2 lakh for the server license and Rs 5,000 per user license in India.