The company, in which Citybank holds 18 per cent through its venture fund, is in consultation with merchant bankers for the initial offer.

Newgen has also picked up a 25 per cent equity stake in California-based PaperFly Corporation. Negen has licensed its OmniDocs technology to PaperFly and for this technology transfer, the company has got a stake in the US-based company. PaperFly will pay a royalty of $3.5 lakh per annum (appr Rs 1.54 crore) to Newgen.

Newgen's license to PaperFly is only for North America and is on the lookout for similar partnerships in European and Sout East Asian regions, Nigam said.

Newgen is planning to give a big push to its product promotional activities and has chalked out a major expansion plan. As part of its growth strategy, Newgen will open offices in UK and Singapore and set up a development centre in Chennai. The product promotion plan also includes world-wide launch of OmniDocs and OmniReport, expansion of web enabled services and ecommerce solutions and expansion of its US subsidiary. Also, the company will be setting up dotcom services (ASP model) for document management and workflow. The IPO proceeds will be used to part fund the project.

``Indian software industry is now moving to the next stage, where rather than providing software resources and contract work, they will become strategic partners of foreign companies and earn greater rewards,'' said Nigam. PaperFly will start offering document management services on the Web using Newgen's OmniDocs in the third quarter of 2000.

Newgen's ASP (application software provider) model with all the hardware and software is set up at a single place and many organisations can avail the service leveraging the power of Internet.

By using this, small to medium sized companies, which are spread over different locations, time zones and even across the world, can get the benefit of efficient collaborative working without the need of huge investments. OmniDocs, designed for web architecture, can support thousands of organisations and individual users simultaneously.

Newgen, which is a software product development and technology company, specialises in document management, workflow, report management and e-commerce solutions. The company was established by Diwakar Nigam and T S Varadarajan (both have M.Tech in computer science from IIT Madras).

The promoters have 20 years of experience in the design, development and marketing of software products and services. With a total employee strength of 350 (including 250 software professionals and 100 sales engineers), the company has one software development centre located at Okhla in Delhi and one more development centre is coming up at the same place.

The company has a 100 per cent subsidiary in the US, which markets its entire range of products, solutions and services.

In the area of enterprise document management solutions, the company has products like OmniDocs, Batch Scanning software and Newgen TP. For these products, the company has customers like Citybank India, Citybank Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (29 countries), WHO, Maxtouch, BPL West, Tata Telecom and Skycell. Newgen has two enterprise report management system products - OmniReport and SmartStatements. Newgen is the leader in providing Workflow Solutions in India, according to the company. In e-commerce portal development, Newgen provides high-end B2C and B2B ecommerce site development.

Newgen has an equity base of Rs 9.6 crore. For fiscal 2000, the company earned a net profit of Rs 6.24 crore on total income of Rs 22.67 crore.

Of the total turnover, around Rs 11 crore came from domestic operations and the balance from exports. For fiscal 2001, Newgen has projected a net profit of Rs 9.5 crore on total income of Rs 35 crore. The company is currently operating on a net profit margin of 25-30 per cent.