Nartarjan told eFE that the company had already held discussions with a couple of networking and consulting firms overseas. Although, he did not want to comment on the size of the funds, he added, ``The size of the fund should be much higher than the initial chunk.''

On whether consultants would do the valuation of the company, he said, ``Valuations in the current scenario are not realistic.'' The company's management would undertake the valuation exercise on its own, he added without disclosing any numbers.

ICICI Ventures had put in $4 million in the start-up as cumulative convertible preference shares (CCPS) when the company was floated in November last year.

Natarajan said Bangalore Labs was currently writing an IT strategy for the Kanpur-based Dainik Jagran (Hindi newspaper) as the group was in the process of becoming an Internet Service Provider. The company was also chalking out technology plans for a Bangalore-based firm to set up 125 Internet kiosks in the city. The kiosks would also facilitate utility payments.

The company was planning to set up the country's first network operating centre (NOC) in Bangalore. The centre, which would be operational by May, 2000, would function both as a network management system (NMS) and enterprise management system (EMS). It would work as a watch-dog and monitor the assets of the customer besides detecting network failures and overload.

Natrajan said in India the company would focus on the NOC while in the US the focus would be both on an NOC and consulting services. The company has plans for setting up satellite NOCs in Dubai and US, he said.

He said Bangalore Labs would undertake NOC development assignment for other firms. To this end, the company was in talks with two Indian firms.

Currently, the company has three management and technical consulting assignments on hand. The largest is a project for Vysya Bank to network its 125 branches. US consultancy firm AT Kearney has been appointed to study the bank's requirements to implement the project.

In the first year of operations, the company was aiming for a turnover of $4 million and a personnel strength of 100. ``The bulk of our focus will be on the overseas market,'' Natarajan said. The company already set up offices in Dubai to address the Middle East market and recently received permission to open five offices in the US. By early 2001 the company would foray into Singapore and European markets, he said.

The company has identified 13 different networking services including strategy consultancy, infrastructure, security, disaster recovery and redundancy, intranet and extranet, proofing and benchmarking, knowledge transfer, optimisation, convergence, relocation and migration and offsite management.

The company in association with Computer Associates, Cabletron and Lucent also offers corporate training programmes. Over the last three months, the company has trained over 100 people from various companies.