The $289 million company, which is looking at half-a-billion dollars in revenues worldwide this year, offers industrial growth infrastructure for web to mainframe applications.

In India, the company will be operating through partners (software companies and systems integrators) as also developing its own customer base alongside.

BEA country manager Srikant Rao told The Financial Express that the company was ``a little early in setting up shop here'' last September with organisations still in the process of putting systems in place.

``However, with the networking infrastructure in place, organisations are looking at actually translating the investment in IT into services for the customer,'' Rao said, adding that even in government departments the pressure was building togo online with existing systems.

The India liaison office of the company's Hong Kong-based arm is primarily targeting the financial sector including banks, governments (states as well as the Centre) and corporates that need to implement large applications --- such as supply chain management, vendor networks, ERP, etc, across wide networks.

Working between platforms, across organisations on the client/server model, middleware needs to provide high levels of reliability and availability (handling large numbers of transactions running in millions) between applications.

The company's products provide the software `infrastructure' for transaction management --- which includes transactions between application servers and software across a variety of platforms (which often include legacy systems).

The company has its sights set on a large piece of the $4 billion global market for middleware (Standish Group projections for the year 2002) and hopes to become a $1 billion company in two years.

BEA is alsoluring software firms eyeing the overseas market for customised applications with the middleware-related services carrot that is expected to grow to around $40 billion by the year 2002.

According to Rao, BEA is the leader in the middleware segment with 35 per cent of the overall marketshare with products like Tuxedo (a transaction manager) leading in their respective segments.

Software vendors can customise applications around BEA products for overseas customers, a concept that Rao says is taking off with several leading players (he declined to name them) committing themselves to training projects at the company's development centres.