N Sekar, president, e-business unit also disclosed that the company was holding discussions with leading global consultancy firms like RazorFish and Scient for tie ups. "These partnerships will largely be for knowledge transfer since Indian consultants currently lack domain expertise in this area," said Sekar.

Sekar also indicated that Satyam Infoway was in discussions with several leading players in the Internet space for alliances. Sekar did not rule out a potential alliance with AOL-Time Warner but did not spell out the scope of the potential partnership. "Yes, we are talking to AOL among several others since we believe that the Net is all about partnerships," he added. Satyam Infoway plans to launch a couple of AOL products on its portal shortly, one of which is the AOL Messenger.

Satyam's recently launched SBU dealing with e-business services, plans to leverage all of Satyam's current strengths to deliver services to the corporate sector. "We can provide our portal which is a consumer interface, create business infrastructure, set up call centres, help drive traffic to portals and design Internet marketing strategies purely by leveraging our current strengths," explains Sekar.

The SBU plans to target sectors like banking and finance, telecom and automobiles to begin with. Satyam also represents Broadvsion in India, a company which provides a customer-focussed tool that enables one-to-one marketing, according to Sekar. The Broadvision technology primarily comprises a platform with vertical applications. As an effective tool for one-to-one marketing it works partially on the basis of consumer databases maintained on it by the company and partly on the basis of a dynamic process especially when it comes to serving ads to the customer. "We want to address companies who are serious about leveraging the Net for business," says Sekar. The e-business unit its earlier avtaar had handled only strategic accounts and software services for corporates, the current plan is to provide end to end solutions to corporates.

Satyam's other SBUs include Corporate Services, Consumer Services and a Technology Group involved in customer support and implementation.