"Our infotech wing will be growing rapidly in the next three years and by the turn of the century we might be better known as an IT company," chairman & managing director Sadhan C Dutt said on Monday.

The company is also seriously looking at the business of data scanning and conversion into electronic data. Data-Core Systems Inc, the Philadelphia-based information technology consultancy arm of DCL, is aiming at a turnover of $100 million by the turn of the century.

Data-Core is owned by AMDC Inc, a DCL subsidiary based in USA. The company plans to attain a turnover of around $30 million in 1998. The 1999 target is at $50 million and the target for 2000 is $80 million.

Shyamal Choudhury, chief executive officer of Data-Core is in India at the moment to recruitsoftware professionals. Addressing the press conference he said, "We are looking for around 300 people for 1999 only and our requirement till 2000 is between 500 and 700 people."

Data-Core Systems has packages for banks and libraries on offer and will be marketing them in India shortly. The company is also entering the ERP implementation field.

"We are already assisting clients who are implementing ERP solutions from SAP, BaaN and Oracle with support services. We will be starting implementation programmes for Oracle ERP packages soon," Choudhury said.

DCL also has an infotech wing in India called Data-Core India which coordinates its activities with Data-Core Systems. The company has development centres at Calcutta, Bangalore and Chennai.

"We will be investing at each of these centres. Our Calcutta centre is already connected with our Philadelphia office by a 264 kbps line and it is also connected to our Long Island office," Choudhury said.

"We are looking out for people from India. Of the 300people we have in USA around 200 are non-Americans and majority of these are Indians," Choudhury said. Recently the company has done some recruitment from Singapore too.

Joseph McGrath, the director sales of Data-Core, said "We could have tripled our business almost overnight if we could recruit the right kind of people at will."

In fact 200 people are employed at the company's data-scan centre in Calcutta. This involves scanning documents and transferring them to a centre where the data is keyed in and converted into digital databases.