Infrastructure outsourcing is a growing market in India and for the same reason it has caught the imagination of the Indian industry at large. It overcomes traditional bottlenecks of infrastructure implementation, maintenance and upgradation. Here’s an attempt to delve in to details of Infrastructure outsourcing.

The cost and complexity of managing your enterprise IT infrastructure is intimidating particularly when the need of the hour is core competency. Enterprise woes pertaining to infrastructure management increase in magnitude when faced with the challenge of expanding the Infrastructure framework to meet emerging e-business opportunities.

Infrastructure outsourcing is a viable alternative worth considering given the fact that it overcomes traditional bottlenecks of infrastructure implementation, maintenance and upgradation. It leaves your enterprise free to manage business growth.

IT infrastructure management, focused on ensuring that customer applications and infrastructure keep pace with dynamic business. This includes effective infrastructure management for desktops, network, helpdesk, messaging, server mail and database management.

IT infrastructure outsourcing is a partnership deal with a service provider who creates responsive infrastructure by planning, consulting, testing and maintaining services that architect, integrate and manage host-centric, distributed and network environments. The service provider also manages the entire gamut of hardware needed for the smooth functioning of mainframes, distributed architectures, LANs, WANs. Services include infrastructure supply and e-procurement, platform hosting, IT operations, and administration on site or remotely

IT outsourcing solutions for Infrastructure Management include:

• Systems Management
• Network Management
• StorageWorks Utility Solution
• Business Continuity
  

Infrastructure Outsourcing – Need of the hour

It is important to understand the reasons why companies are taking to infrastructure outsourcing and thus understand how it can help a growing enterprise like yours. Here are some thoughts -

• Most businesses are e-enabled today and e-business systems are more complex than the traditional corporate business systems that require specialized management.
• Considering the times we are in now it is not a feasible proposition for enterprises to have dedicated technical in-house teams for handling complex technologies like corporate firewalls or integration issues.
• It is highly costly for enterprises to address issues like Network and process management, in addition to critical issues like security.
• Quality testing, measurement and reporting are rigorous and complicated, taking away a lot of valuable time.
  

Infrastructure outsourcing benefits

Infrastructure outsourcing is perfectly suited to the current trends of the economy. Most important advantages could be:

• Cost effectiveness – The cost of setting up an e-business infrastructure runs in to enormous proportions. This could be avoided by infrastructure outsourcing as you can save on maintenance, management and manpower that takes away major chunk of your investment.
• Greater accountability- In an infrastructure outsourcing partnership, reports on performance are generated and delivered to the outsourcing company to analyze the same. Further, these reports are used for trend analysis, capacity and configuration planning motives.
• Enhanced efficiency- The efficiency of the company can be substantially improved as this would help you to concentrate on your core strengths and at the same time help you to utilize the infrastructure capabilities to further your organization goals.
• State of Art technology- Once the infrastructure is outsourced, you can ensure that a ‘state of art’ infrastructure is in place, without bothering about the ‘nitti-gritties’ of implementation.
  

In addition, the possibility of gaining valuable insights from the service provider is a value addition.

The benefits provided by Net ProActive Services (P) Ltd., a leading Internet Infrastructure Management Company in Bangalore, for example, can be collated briefly in the words of R Prabhakar, Head - Managed Services Net ProActive Services, "we bring the following value proposition to our customers:

1. Defined service level objectives and targeted improvements
2. ITIL based best practices in IT management
3. Automated tools for continuous measurement and quality reporting
4. 24x7 monitoring of systems, networks and security
5. Thought leaders in managed security and performance consulting

Trends In India

"IT infrastructure outsourcing is a growing market in India. We see an increased activity in the market with more customers looking at outsourcing options in order to focus on their core competencies. Customers are looking at high-value offerings like guaranteed availability, automated help desk, asset management, which is a sign of maturing marketplace. The market has moved from being FM type engagements which are out-tasking engagements to complete it outsourcing" is Prabhakar’s response to the trends in India.

Future Focus

Prabhakar is very positive about the future of infrastructure outsourcing. This is what he had to say about the future, "Infrastructure outsourcing has a well-defined roadmap and this will be a key contribution in IT services market in India". Further he is of the opinion that there is increasing customer awareness and this is going to put more pressure on quality of services from outsourcing partners. Here, he sees a growing opportunity for his company and others in this segment.

Infrastructure Outsourcing is here to stay as it keeps enterprises focussed but however factors like quality of service and customer satisfaction will be the driving forces for the growth of this segment.