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BANGALORE, Feb. 21

PLANETASIA, the Microland group company which provides global technology and solutions has reinvented itself once again to shift focus to the enterprise market with enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions.

Calling the period starting 2002 "the reality years'', the co-CEO of Planetasia, Mr Anand Sudarshan, said that there were no longer distinct "Internet companies'' and all Internet applications had become part of mainstream. Companies are not blindly investing in technology anymore but are looking at definite business benefits, he said.

Post the implementation of ERP, SCM, and such other applications, companies are now looking at integrating their internal systems with the external ecosystem. Planetasia, like a lot of other IT companies is now offering integration frameworks to unify the internal and external systems.

"Customers have invested huge amounts in technology and an integration framework will help the maximise their returns out of it," Mr Sudarshan said.

The strategic shift has been accompanied by a reduction in staff and retraining them. "At the beginning of this financial year, we had 500 employees. At the end of it, we expect to have 350," Mr Sudarshan said.

The company has moved out people with skills in the visual and pure web technologies, Mr Sudarshan said. Instead, it has hired more people with skills on legacy systems and client servers. Some of the people have also been retrained, he said.

Mr Sudarshan said the company would end the year with `lower' revenues than the previous year. Last year, Planetasia made a little less than $15 million, he said.

The company is cash rich and is profitable, he claimed. In the last three rounds of funding in 1998, 1999, and 2000, it managed to raise a total of $ 9 million.

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