The Hindu Business Line : Harbinger group plans to scale up operations in Pune

THE Harbinger group based in Pune has launched a centre of excellence in e-learning technology in the city with an investment of Rs 4.5 crore and is firming up plans to scale up operations in the next 12 months taking head count from the current 110 to 200.

Talking to reporters on the occasion, the Chairman and Managing Director, Mr Vikas Joshi, said that with the demand for e-learning growing at a healthy rate globally, the company is now in the process of acquiring land to set up a full-fledged campus of its own in the city in a couple of years.

The company will invest an additional Rs 2 crore next year to scale up operations before they firm up investments for the proposed campus, Mr Joshi said.

The centre of excellence, meanwhile, will maintain and build upon the company's position as the largest e-learning technology company in the country, according to Mr Joshi who said it will work on new and innovative products in e-learning and build up a body of intellectual property through its product `Elicitus'.

"Currently, intellectual property driven business accounts for 25 per cent of our revenues, but we have targeted this to be above 50 per cent in the medium term," Ms Anuradha Kanitkar, CEO, said.

Meanwhile, the company's standards for offline content management interface, of which a presentation had been made to the Aviation Industry Computer-based Training Committee (AICC), a body which steers standardisation in the e-learning space, is soon to come up for final voting by the committee at Miami.

The committee's approval could mean that global players in the $6-billion e-learning space will have to adopt them to remain competitive. The off-line content player, through which Harbinger had demonstrated its standards to the AICC, meanwhile, has already found a taker in the US market where it is being implemented for a pharma major, Mr Joshi said.

The company is, in the meanwhile, planning to grow its business also through IP-driven services such as consulting and outsourcing with the services covering areas such as collaborative learning, learning content management, content authoring, learning management and virtual classrooms.

"We are also planning to increase out presence in the US through our subsidiary based in Redmond and also expand our network of resellers in Europe, Asia-Pacific and other large global markets," Mr Joshi said.

The company is also planning to simultaneously sign up consortium relationships with players entrenched in various verticals and last week signed up with a consortium in the automotive vertical.

In India, the company has established itself in niche verticals IT, telecom and BPO, banking, finance and insurance, pharma, processes and chemicals and automobiles. Globally its customers include Bristol Myers Squibb, United Nations and Citibank.

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