The company has identified two listed companies for acquisition, one in the US and the other in India, to further its growth plans.

"We are expecting the acquisition exercise to be completed by the first half of 2003 and reverse merge two or more of our subsidiaries with the acquired entities," said Srini Raju, chairman of ilabs.

"Though ilabs has no plans to get listed on the bourses, we realised that having listed entities in our investment portfolio will help in assessment of the group's value in market capitalisation terms and so on," Raju said.

However, he refused to divulge the details of the acquisition at this juncture. The ilabs group at present has a staff strength of around 1,000 people and post acquisition, the total strength will exceed 3,000.

ilabs' own team consists of around 200 engineers which works on building processes and methodologies for Internet systems architecture and design, object-oriented methodologies, database technologies, security and privacy issues.

ilabs has so far incubated eight companies -- CyberNet, Xius, Esolutions, Bonzai, Ingenovis, elabs, Megasoft and another company in Europe, which is now being set up.

All of these companies are working primarily in three domains -- telecommunications, life sciences and Internet enabled businesses.

Ingenovis, the biosciences division of ilabs has developed four products -- inSync, inStruct and inQuest and inLims, which are expected to be launched in 2003 in a phased manner.

CyberNet, in which a US-based telecom association is a major investor, has already clocked a turnover of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion).

The company invested over Rs 100 crore in these companies. ilabs plans to first consolidate these companies in the next three months before launching the next wave of new initiatives.

“ilabs has a group of investors, we are now planning to liquidate some of our assets and create a fund which will own shares in all the subsidiaries and listed companies,” Srini said.

“I will be getting into the boards of the two listed companies that are being acquired, which is the reason why I am planning to step down from Satyam Computer Services' board soon,” Srini said.