The $900-million company will continue with its strategy of developing solutions tailor-made for customer needs. "We believe that customers are focussed on deployment of cost-effective business solutions with minimal risk. The Sybase strategy with emphasis on solution enabling technology and domain expertise in targeted markets will provide a differentiated offering to customers," he added.

According to Sybase managing director (Saarc countries) Ramana Gogula, the company has a two-pronged strategy for the future. The first will be to continue to develop and build software in the country under the made in India programme. The programme has 29 partners engaged indiverse fields like telecom and healthcare. Second will be to make the Sybase software accessible to more developers and universities under the Step programme. "We have tied up with over 13 universities in this regard," he said.

Gogula considers that the biggest push for Sybase will come from the governments. Over the next five years governments will emerge as the largest IT spenders. While we have some projects in Andhra Pradesh, we are also in talks with other states. Since most of the states will require to create huge databases and maintain them, we stand a good chance of bagging huge orders," he said. Sybase is in talks with the Rajasthan government in this regard.

The Rajasthan government uses Sybase for its police information system called Rakshak. Yet another area is tourism. Sybase will work with the Rajasthan government in setting up information kiosks round the state and also link up the various tourist resorts, he added.