Says Sunil Chandna, managing director, ``Stellar is geared up to take on the challenge of recovering data with innovative and proactive solutions which will take care of customers' needs completely. Feedback on both our products -Stellar 7.0 and Stellar Shield-has been good and the next step now is to increase penetration to smaller cities to service their needs.''

With a dealer network of 50, including one each in Nepal and Bangladesh, it plans to increase the number to 150 by September, specially in B and C class towns in north-eastern and western India. Besides dealers, it plans to tie up with third party service companies for contracts for PC maintenance. It is also in talks with major PC vendors like Compaq for bundling offers. Online sales of Stellar 7.0 are also possible in the last quarter.

In the next quarter, Stellar hopes to tap more foreign markets. Says Chandna, ``We are in talks with parties in Australia, Spain and Dubai. The evaluation process is over and commercial terms are currently being worked out.''

The company is targeting financial institutions, corporates, banks and the SOHO segment. Stellar's clientele includes RBI, SBI, Red Cross, AIIMS, ORG Marg, Wipro, Maruti Udyog etc. Stellar data recovery software has several versions, the latest being Stellar 7.0, which has made the product faster and more user-friendly, making recovery possible from any media and operating system, while earlier versions had been compatible with floppies only.

Stellar Shield, launched six months back, can secure data against various threats. Once installed, every time the computer is booted, the software takes a snapshot of the drive and stores it safely in the disk. When the disk becomes inaccessible, the software rebuilds the crashed disk. While Stellar Shield costs Rs 1,500, Stellar 7.0 is priced at Rs 4,000.

With its expansion plans in place, Stellar is targeting a turnover of Rs 4 crore from products and services this year, against last year's turnover of Rs 1.2 crore.