'We have got $7.5 mn in series B financing'

XO Systems, provider of web services based business applications that address
the dashboard market, received a second round of funding to the tune of $7.5 mn
from four investors including Cisco Systems. Microsoft has also identified CXO
Systems as one of the top 40 technology innovators in its innovation brochure
for 2004. Abhay Patil, Operations Director, CXO Systems India, spoke to Nanda
Kasabe of Cyber-Media News about the company's plans.

How do you plan to utilize the funds generated by the second round of
financing?

CXO Systems has secured $7.5 mn in Series B financing. Ironside Ventures led the
round with new strategic investor Cisco Sys-tems Inc and origi-nal investors
Gran-dBanks Capital and Kodiak Ven-ture Partners. While we plan to use around 25
percent of these funds for product develop-ment, the rest will be utilized in
marketing the product named CXO System. The R&D team in Pune will use 50
per-cent of the funds being put aside for product develop-ment, whereas the bulk
of the first round of financing (more than 70 percent) was invested in
development.

What is the USP of your dashboard solution?

The CXO dashboard solution provides a one-touch, real-time view of the
business by inte-grating disparate data sources acr-oss different plat-forms,
thereby helping top man-agement gain greater visibility into key performance
indica-tors, leading the way to faster and more effective decision-making.

The solution pulls and integrates information from operational and analytical
sys-tems, providing executives the immediate access they need to make business
decisions with-out new large investments in data warehousing, business
intelligence or EAI tools.

What is your "go to market" strategy for the solution in the
global market?

Around 75 percent of the funds from the second round of financing will be
used to develop our marketing efforts and create chan-nel partners. While the
exis-ting product has around 10 cus-tomers, we hope to increase this numbers
significantly.

What about the cost?

The cost of implemen-tation of this solution varies from case to case.
However, the average cost of the CXO dashboard would be some-where near
$270,000. Our present client base includes Deutsche Bank, British American
Tobacco, and the US Department of Homeland Security.

How would you define your India strategy? Do you see more work coming out
of the Indian arm?

CXO Systems is head-quartered in Waltham, with development centers in Sunnyvale
and Pune. The India R&D center was laun-ched almost a year ago to serve as
an extension of CXO's R&D efforts at Sunnyvale.

Two of the five inventors of the dashboard patent pending technology solution
are from Pune. The Indian team curre-ntly has 12 members and this will be
increased to 25 in the next two years. Out of the deve-lopment budget, Pune will
receive 50 percent of the funds, and the rest will go to Sun-nyvale. We have a
split development model here that ensures a cost-effective and high quality
innovation cycle resulting in efficient delivery of market solutions.

What is the company's roadmap?

The existing product has information on dashboards. The next step is to make
the knowledge actionable. Three verticals, namely managing outsourcing,
corporate per-formance management and research and analysis for financial
institutions, have been identified for branding.

The CXO advisor dash-board, slated to hit the market next year, will
ident-ify the problem areas and suggest action, while the Control Dashboard
slated for a release in the year 2006, will close the feedback loop.