The product, which will be jointly owned by these two companies, is likely to hit the market within the next eight months. The product will help both the textile manufacturers and its customers in the middle segment to transact business in a better way.

"The software solutions and services will be marketed in America by ETCS, a leading apparel-marketing company. Currently we are employing about 20-25 professionals for the project," Ashok Leyland Information Technology chief operating officer Rajesh C Makhija said.

Makhija said his company is also planning to revamp its US operations in a big way aiming a sales target of $12 million. To this effect, the company has appointed Dan Thatte as its chief executive officer at its USoutfit, which had posted a revene of about $7 million last year. Apart from its US subsidiary - ALit Inc, the company has a fully owned arm in the UK which is also undergoing a major revamp, Makhija said.

Meanwhile, Ashok Leyland Information Technology on Thursday joined hands with Financial Network Services Pty Ltd (FNS) of Australia for marketing the latter's banking software products - Bancs and Bancs Treasury - in the country. The target segment will be the nationalised and co-operative banks.

The Bancs architecture offers banks with flexibility in implementing a single-core banking systems in a completely centralised or a combination of centralised and decentralised environment. The company claimed that Bancs caters to the needs of multi-tiered institutions with head office, regional and branch structures.

Bancs allows the system to operate across multiple operating environments - Unix, Windows NT, MVS and VAX. It can also be used with any relational database management system and corporate generalledger. It provides fully integrated treasury and related risk-management functionality.

Ashok Leyland Information Technology associate vice president (banking and AS/400 solutions) Uday Sengupta said the A$ 43-million Financial Network Services offers such services in the Middle East, Africa, Australia and south-east Asia.