The two companies have together decided to invest upto Rs 6 crore in the venture which will utilise CA's Unicenter TNG platform to develop applications in the two areas which form core domain expertise of Escorts group.

Announcing this at a joint press conference on Monday, CA chairman and chief executive officer Charles B Wang and Escorts chairman Rajan Nanda said CA-Escosoft Ltd will leverage CA's wide range of IT solutions in India.

The venture will develop, market, licence and service solutions based on Unicenter TNG. Later, it will also look at export of such applications overseas. ``Our strategy for India is to partner with more local companies to propagate our technology and support development of the country's highly-qualified IT industry,'' said Wang.

Wang also inaugurated the second software development centre of CA-TCG Software (CATS), its other joint venture in India. The Delhi centre is the second such to be launched by CATS after Calcutta centre was set up early last year. The Delhi centre will also work on CA products and is likely to be a major boost for the global professional services arm of CATS.

Escorts chairman Rajan Nanda said the new company would break even in the next two to three years, Nanda said the CEO and other members of the management would be appointed soon. Wang said CA would leverage on Escosoft's knowledge of market place, expertise in marketing and its huge technical manpower in developing solutions for the telecom and healthcare sectors, which are growing at a phenomenal rate.

Wang said CA-Escosoft would explore export opportunities after creating products and making them popular in the domestic market. CA-Escosoft would develop software system and application for the telecom sector as well as various system integration and healthcare solutions for the domestic industry, Wang said. "We foresee enormous growth opportunities in these two sectors as rapid growth has been forecast in the number of Internet users," he said.