Pending that, it will set up iForce ready centres in alliance with partners. At least one such centre is planned to start in India and Singapore over next few months involving fresh investment from the parent company, Sun India managing director Bhaskar Pramanik said. Sun will be investing $20 million in promoting its iForce initiative globally along with partners. Of this, as much as $6 million could be invested in India, Pramanik said.

iForce is an umbrella programme under which Sun, along with its partners, will provide handholding and bundle all its dot com programmes, from incubation of the start-ups to devising a go-to-market strategy. The company has put together all its platform, technology and service solution offerings together and tied up with a host of partners for the rest.

It comprises tie-ups with ASPs like Vignette and Broadvision, system integrators like Wipro, NIIT and Tata Infotech, Internet data Center companies like Netmagic, Exodus and Spectranet, and incubators like ICICI Infotech.

The services will span across proof of concept centers, Sun consulting, methodology, remote services, Sun Connect Inception, Web-learning centers and training in its technologies like iPlanet, Solaris, Java and Jini. "iForce could comprise as much as 80 to 90 per cent of all revenue from India. And the good thing is that our focus is not just the dot coms.

This year, it will be large companies looking at Web-enabling themselves, the actual enterprise resource planning work which will get us a lot of revenue flowing in this year," said vice-president and general manager Sun Microsystems Inc Anil Gadre. Sun is also set to make its Bangalore-based software development facility, the India Engineering Centre, as the largest outside of USA within three years. The center, spread across 70,000 sq feet, presently has 125 engineers. It is set to grow to 400 by end of the year and have 1,000 engineers within next two-and-a-half years, said IEC managing director e Avinash Agrawal. Sun has 15 software developmentcenters worldwide, but unlike Bangalore, few of those do applications development.

``Initially designed to be a corporate resource center with representation of all our business units, the Bangalore center is set to grow manifold in the coming two years,'' said Agrawal.

In fact, Sun India is in the process of applying for a patent for a technology in high-performance computing arena developed by this center, Agrawal said. Much of Sun's development in network management products and applications is being done in this lab, he added.