The $400 million company, engaged in systems integration and international management consultancy, is planning an initial investment of $1 million over a period of five years, said Rahul Chawla, managing director, CTP.

"We have sought permission from the FIPB to make this investment over a five-year period. The Indian arm will be a 100 per cent subsidiary of the parent firm with exports as main focus," he added. The Bangalore office will be the third in Asia apart from Tokyo and Melbourne. Cambridge has 47 offices worldwide with 3,400 employees.

According to Chawla, the Nasdaq 100 company's USP is effective combination of strategic consulting, IT strategy, process innovation and implementation, custom package software deployment, network services, and training.

Rapid delivery of end-to-end business systems using these will be the line of action for the firm.The Bangalore unit will work on virtual development for overseas clients and work on delivery of fixed-price/fixed-time IT solutions for Indian clients.

The main areas of operation for the company will be telecommunications, banking and manufacturing industries, said Chawla.

"In the last three months we have been approached by a large number of companies who want to work with us in the ERP arena and in Internet-client/server domain. However, since the details are being worked out no names can be revealed," he added.

Over the last six years Cambridge has deployed and developed over 2,000 customised applications and done over 380 ERP implementations with a 90 per cent success rate. The company has pioneered a service called Cambridge Momentum that allows it to deliver a fixed-time/fixed-price solution for BAAN or PeopleSoft implementations to be done in a matter of a few months by using its own custom developed templates, said Vivek Kwatra, client partner, CTP.

The Indian operations of the company havebeen split into two strategic business units - Internet/client-server group and Enterprise Resource Solution (ERS) group. The Internet SBU will focus on customer management systems and knowledge management solutions. "The Cambridge objective is to deliver interactive solutions, as far as possible, within a three-month time frame," said Kwatra.

In the ERS category the company apart from its alliances with PeopleSoft and BAAN has also tie ups with SAP and Oracle.

"By combining change management services and integrating the technology aspects in the change management effort, we believe that our services will be accepted in the country," said K Sridharan, client partner, STP.

"ERP deployments are 80 per cent change management and process re-engineering, and 20 per cent technology," he added.

Though Cambridge has not set any targets it expects 20 per cent of its revenue in the initial years from consultancy and 80 per cent from implementation and integration of projects, said Chawla. Currently it isworking on five projects while three have already been implemented.