Mixed feelings at Laser Soft

Chennai: IT entrepreneur B Suresh Kamath, managing director, Laser Soft Infosystems Limited is a simultaneously happy and sad man today. (See: B Suresh Kamath: The humane CEO).

He is happy that Corporation Bank has deployed Laser Panacea, the core banking solution from his software firm across its 900 branches, making it the first public sector bank in the country (other than a couple of State Bank of India associate banks) to have networked 100 per cent of its branches through a core banking solution.

What is more interesting is that Laser Soft earned less than Rs12 crore towards this software installation from Corporation Bank ever since it started implementing Laser Panacea in 2004. "We started the pilot project in one branch and on its success, we scaled up the deployment of core banking solution," says Kamath. According to him Laser Panacea is the lightest core banking solution that minimises the use of costly bandwidth and hardware.

The other news that Kamath is happy to share is that Laser Soft is the lowest bidder for the cash management software tender floated by Bank of India and the also that its pilot deployment of the core banking solution at Catholic Syrian Bank will be accomplished soon.

What makes him sad is that Laser Soft will be out of Andhra Bank since the bank appointed KPMG as its consultant for the core banking solution project. The bank has floated a tender for selecting core banking solutions with some crore minimum turnover conditions for bidders. The bank has implemented core banking solution on a cluster basis across its 1,038 units. In 2006 the bank selected KPMG as.

Interestingly, the bank had won a couple of awards for its information and technology (IT) initiatives that Lase Soft had implemented.