Delhi-based Prime Securities is likely to be appointed for the evaluation process after which the agreement will be concluded. The company seems to have ruled out the public offer route. Indus Software managing director Vivek Mannige declined to comment on the private placement of equity but ruled the probability of a public offer for the next three years.

Indus Software is a product company and has a turnover of around Rs 12 crore. The company is aiming to touch Rs 20 crore in sales by next year.

Indus has just launched the Lending Solutions from Indus (LSI) on DB2 Universal Database from IBM Corp.

LSI is a workflow-based, web-enabled and integrated solution for banking and financing companies to manage finance business in the areas of auto, consumer, home and personalloans. It offers entire process life cycle, covering application processing, repayment management and collection management of delinquent loans with hire purchase and leasing functionality. It also supports credit card application processing.

Indus has developed its solutions on Oracle and other platforms but not on IBM. Since most of the European firms use IBM platforms, any entry into the financial sector of the region needed an extension of LSI suite on these systems. Indus started working with IBM under its independent software vendor programme and became the first of this kind in the country by using IBM's component broker technology and DB2 UDB.

On the benefits of LSI on IBM platforms, Vivek Mannige said that companies having large scale databases could manage them better and could offer their prospects and facility to apply for loans on the Internet.

Both the partners will now focus on marketing the product in the US and Australia. In India, Indus has clients like Countrywide, a GE joint ventureas the company is a preferred software partner for GE's operations worldwide.

LSI on IBM DB2 works without any proprietary gateway and its wide area network allows for a centralised database with minimum degradation of response. It uses the Corba technology as middle layer. The DB2 can handle over 10 million loan accounts.