Jha told The Financial Express that most of the investment would go into the development of EAI (enterprise application integration) infrastructure, development of B2B transaction middleware and also for the development of the company's education portal, B2Education.

According to Jha, the funds were raised from venture capital firms and financial institutions. Jha said soon there was going to be huge middleware requirement in the global market. ``There will be a shortage of the right product in the market and we will cash in on the situation,'' he said.From EAI and B2B areas, the company was targeting a revenue of $25 million during 2001-2002, he said.

iCMG was in the process of setting up knowledge bases for its Internet education services in Germany and Sweden through local partners. ``Currently we are scouting for technical and strategic partners in these regions,'' Jha said. The company would zero in on 15 to 20 such partners within three months, he said.

According to Forbes and IDC studies, the middleware object request broker (ORB) market was expected to touch $707 million by 2001, B2E (business to education) to $2.7 trillion by 2004, application services to $1.65 billion by 2002 and transaction services to $740 million by 2004. However, EAI alone was expected to touch $3.25 billion by 2002.

Headquartered in Virginia, iCMG is a global player in standards based component object oriented, distributed computing. The company also works towards evolution of frameworks and reusable software components.