As OFC backbones fall into place across emerging markets, home gateways seamlessly network every home and location sensitive services and technologies seek to put every person on the network, pervasive computing (facilitating seamless networking of non-PC devices for voice, data, image and graphics) is the buzz.

Talking about pervasive computing, technology start-up Tarang Software Technologies chairman and CEO V Rama Kumar is betting his business heavily on this emerging concept.

``Pervasive is the key word for our business. If the Internet grew with the PC, the Supranet is the next big wave that will push data and communications through wireless technology,'' Mr Kumar says. Over the past few months, wireless technology has grown in popularity and has been identified as one of the fastest growing technology segments.

Bandwidth issues on wireless networks were also being actively looked into and as the data transfer moved from circuit switching to packet switching and bandwidth from 2G to 2.5 G and 3G the industry was expecting to see great changes in the way businesses operated, he added.

Tarang in particular is looking at three specific areas for building pervasive computing applications -- business to employee (B2E) for mobile field force automation, applications for financial data products and services and CRM management. The company is also set to offering services for setting up pervasive computing architecture.

The company floated a few months ago has set itself a significant revenue target of $100 million in four years of operations. On the cards are expansion plans and strategic technology alliances in line with its plans to focus extensively on the US, Europe and Japan markets. Tarang has set up its US operations in California and New Jersey. The Scandinavia office is expected to go on stream by April 2001 and Japan operations will follow. The company has also formed two strategic global alliances for consulting and system integration.