Some of the major companies that have shown interest in data warehousing products are SAS Institute, Oracle, Cognos and Informix. Some of these major IT companies that have interest in both database and data warehousing products use third-part BI tools and, according to Millenium, these companies have shown keen interest.

Millenium is ready with the version 1.1 MCube OLAP tool and may either sell its intellectual property rights (IPR) in the product or go in for a strategic partnership where further development rights and the source code will remain with the company.

"If the price is good then we may go for an IPR sale. Major companies are willing to buy the tool or go in for a worldwide partnership. We will soon strike a deal," said Mr Avijit Guha, of the company's business development group.

The company refused to give details about the negotiations but informed The Financial Express that it expects to rake in Rs 70 crore if it goes for an outright sale of the OLAP tool. The company has taken three years to develop the tool at an estimated cost of Rs 1.5 crore.

According to Millenium, worldwide there are 19 companies that have developed OLAP tools for business forecasting.

"MCube is the only BI tool developed by an Asian company. It is less resource-hungry and runs on a desktop or a notebook. The single-user version costs Rs 40,000 which is much less than five-user version of Power Play from Cognos and Oracle Express from Oracle," Mr Guha pointed out.

Millenium scouts for MNC buyers for MCube Mr Guha also informed The Financial Express that these companies are looking at the acquisition of MCube simply because of its architecture. "We are positioning MCube as a small footprint personal business tool. One of the key features of this tool is its external scripting support which makes integration easy with the existing software packages," he said.

Within the country, Millenium is planning to distribute the product through major IT companies like CMC, Wipro and Tata Infotech. "Many Indian companies have also shown interest in the software, we are just waiting for the outcome of the ongoing negotiations with the multinational companies," he said.

Millenium, which has an investment of Rs 7.04 crore, has equity participation from Industrial Development Bank of India, West Bengal Industrial Development Corp and West Bengal Electronics Industrial Development Corp Ltd.

The company is working on software like monitoring of schemes (MOS), human resource management system and hospital management system. According to Millenium, the government of West Bengal is running a pilot of its MOS package in Burdwan district in order to establish a centralised database on monitoring of various central and state government projects.