Genovate on the Lookout for Partners, Franchises

Genovate Solutions, a company endorsed and funded by the Trade Development Board of Singapore, has chalked out aggressive plans which it claims will help it grow 150-200 percent. The company plans to achieve this phenomenal growth through three initiatives: Training through a network of franchises, offshore software development and speech-enabling existing IVRs. To support this initiative, the company, according to J. Anton Ravindran, CEO and co-founder, Genovate, will invest $2-3 million over a period of 12-18 months. He adds, "In India, we want to grow through franchising and/or joint ventures. We are also looking at partnering with one or two companies for software development."

As part of its training initiative, Genovate will concentrate on the corporate segment. It plans to leverage the infrastructure and resources of the partners it makes to provide content. A major part of its investment in this regard will go towards training partners at the head office in Singapore. "We want to partner with those who focus on cutting-edge technologies. Our training will be tailor-made for a given product. We feel that 80 percent of our revenues should come from the top 20 organisations," says Ravindran. The company also plans to focus on interactive e-learning and will offer certified training courses such as SAP, CIW, CCNT, MCSE, etc.

On the development front, Genovate and its local partners will work only on offshore projects in the wireless and speech-enablement areas. "We are looking at small companies that are middleware-oriented. They must be adept in developing applications (Java driven) that connect disparate systems. We will train these companies on Bluetooth, Speech Recognition and Voice XML and are looking for core strengths on EJB, J2E, J2ME, and device computing technologies," says Ravindran.

Genovate's third initiative is to speech-enable the existing IVRs (Interactive Voice Response Systems), and here it will focus mainly on the Telco and financial sector companies. Says Ravindran, "There is huge potential for us here. We will go beyond converting the IVR to speech recognition technology, and create it directly for mobile phones and wireless technology-for companies that don't have any speech-enabled technology. This is a big market and we want to be the leader and an early adapter of this new technology."