Software exports, which make up 75 per cent of the company's total revenue, will continue to get keen focus. In order to achieve the $20 million target of software exports for 2001 ($6 million in 2000), the company planned to significantly ramp up marketing and technical resources in the US, Singapore and UK and set up additional offices, he said. To boost the company's share in the IT education domestically, SQL has signed up with eight partners to open new centres across the country by January 2001 under the `Partner Programme' to offer courses from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. As the market is set to expand towards Web-based education, the company will increase partner centres to 50 by end of 2001, apart from 11 of its own centres, to tap the growing e-learning market, which is expected to go up from 10 per cent to 60 per cent annually by 2004, he said. The company is also in the process of building relationships with organisations to develop portal and learning management system and looking out for bestcontent providers, he revealed.

With the successful completion of the $250,000 pilot project of aviation insurance demonstration model in October for a US company, SQL is expected to get a major project from Swiss Re of Switzerland early next year, thanks to the acquisition of an eight per cent stake in the US-based Solution Technology International Inc (STI). With the assurance of more such projects in the future, SQL is setting up a 50-member team exclusively for STI in Hyderabad, to exploit the opportunity to leverage its offshore-onsite mix of software services and closely integrate development operations, Mr Agarwal explained.