Under the agreement, Modular Systems would bring to Modular Infotech multilingual software products and skills and TVS-E would contribute its strength of marketing and distribution channels, new products and partners. "Taking IT to the heart of India is the theme of this year", says Gopal Srinivasan, director, TVS Electronics. TVS-E sees tremendous opportunity in language-enabled low cost IT, he adds. The challenge is to make Indian language computing easy, seamless and natural, Srinivasan says. The Rs 176 crore TVS-E is targeting a turnover of Rs 250 crore this year and is looking at more acquisitions and alliances.

Mehemosh N Cooper, Raghunandan Joshi and Meena R Joshi, promoters of Modular Systems, will continue to be majority shareholders in the new joint venture.

The 17-year-old company has developed over 3000 Indian language fonts and a range of DTP products including Shree-Lipi, the de-facto standard in the Indian language software market. It is currently working on software text to speech for Indian languages, Indian language optical character recognition software, spell checkers and e-mail solutions in Indian languages.

Company plans to launch appliance for Net browsing
TVS Electronics is all set to launch its compact retail appliances. In the offing is a small keyboard size appliance which has inbuilt storage devices, processors, hard disc, CD drives, a laser-edged keyboard, modem and UPS. This product is aimed at the newly emerging Net browsing segment and the business computing section and is likely to hit the market during August-September in the price range of Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000. More retail-oriented products are in the pipeline where Modular products would be built into these appliances.