What is the state of billing technology in India and abroad? How state-of the-art are SISL's products?
Billing technology in India is catching up with technology available overseas. Earlier, established Billing Solution vendors were all from abroad, however, with the launching of GSM services in India, Indian billing software has also grown rapidly. The advantage of home grown solutions, like that of SISL, is that they are developed keeping the exact requirements of the Indian operators in mind. Billing solutions require considerable customisation, and as it has an in-house product, SISL is able to carry out necessary changes quickly and incorporate all desired features to the full satisfaction of the operator. The operator is able to receive any support he requires as full expertise is readily available with SISL. SISL's products are state-of-the-art as fresh releases are developed to keep pace with new developments. Some features which are not available in products from abroad have already been incorporated here.

What are the salient features of GABS 4 that SISL is developing?
GABS4.0 being a convergent billing product, is being designed to be able to manage and bill any customer service along with GSM service and will then be called General Administration and Billing System. The salient features which it would have are as follows: For wireline telephony, it will have indirect access services (prepaid and postpaid) and calling cards (prepaid and postpaid), while wireless telephony will include WAP, GPRS, prepaid & postpaid. The IP services will include dial-up Internet, broadband services, usage-based Internet, VoIP and VPN.

What other products will you be bringing to the market this year?
It is the policy of the Telecom SBU to deliver products to meet the market requirements. A telco grade voice mail product is expected to be released in the month of August. On special request from South Africa, a service node based billing product will be launched in June. A GPRS billing product which will plug-in with the existing billing solutions will also be introduced in the third quarter of the year. The call centre product suite will have a new product called Intellicontact that will allow enterprises to improve service to their customers via diverse channels of communication such as telephony, e-mail and Web. The planned release is in the third quarter of this year. During the third quarter, a wireline and interconnect billing solution is also planned, to meet the requirements of basic service operators.

What is the turn over you are looking at for this year?
We are looking to notch up a turn over of Rs 40 crore this year for our Telecom SBU, which would be more than 30 per cent growth on our last year's turn over of Rs 30 crore of which Rs 18 crore came from billing alone. We may exceed our target if our billing group gets the orders it has bid for. Our billing solutions are all high value solutions.

What part of your business will come from the overseas market where you seem to be more focussed?
We reckon our overseas business should account for 60 per cent of the total. There we'd be looking at niche markets as, we feel, the income in these markets is assured. Also, these markets allow us to charge a premium for the expertise that we possess.