Tech start-up gets $4 m funding

BANGALORE: Protocol Telecom, a start up venturing into the space of telecom,

convergence and networking solutions, has got $ four million in funding from

private investors in the US. The company expects further investments from

financial institutions during the course of the next calendar year. The company

is privately held and its shareholders include its employees and promoters to

the tune of 40 per cent while the rest is held by the investors and share

holders.

The company will operate and offer solutions and services for the telecom and

networking sector across the world. Close to acquiring a product development lab

in the US, Protocol, has opened office in Mumbai and Delhi, while its head

quartered in Bangalore. Future plans include opening six offices in Asia and a

couple of offices in America by the end of the next calendar year. It expects

its first year of operations ending December 2002, with a turnover of $15

million, globally.

Protocol's Founder and CEO Suresh Gundappa said, "The market demands

cost effective leading edge technologies to be implemented by a good solution

provider and Protocol brings in partnerships and skill sets from leading

technology vendors to implement these solutions." Supplementing his

statement, the company has partnered with Nortel Networks, Enterasys, Cincom,

Dialogic (acquired by Intel), Checkpoint, Opentide, Altitude, Nice and Comverse

to provide these solutions.

The company has sketched out its operational plans focussing on providing

turnkey solutions for contact center and network infrastructure. The contact

center solutions offers CRM, Business Intelligence, Call Center, Interactive

Voice response, Computer Telephony Integration, Speech Recognition and

multimedia enabled contact centers. Network infrastructure solutions encompass

optical, wire line and wireless solutions.