Indian Industry Seeks Avant-Garde IT Solutions

As businesses in India log higher growth figures, companies are falling back on independent service vendors to deliver more specialised IT solutions that can slash costs to a minimum and provide quick benefits of scale, especially in the bullish mid-market segment, which is steering the industry’s growth story.

These solutions take care of the company’s need for information technology (IT) networking, software, day-to-day administrative services and outsourcing needs.

“After a long period of under-investing in their IT infrastructure and keeping most things like security and costs in-house in a do-it-yourself culture, Indian companies have suddenly realised the need to leverage the Web as a channel to expand their businesses rapidly,” said Sumeet Sabharwal, managing director of Navisite India, a provider of IT hosting, outsourcing and professional services to medium to large organisations.

This has led to the evolution of new infrastructure management models that encompass a growing number of managed devices in complex environments spread across multiple locations. This is boosting the adoption of models like Remote Infrastructure Management Services (RIM) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). According to industry experts, SaaS and RIM are the hottest industrial solutions in the IT market today.

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“We leverage independent industry standards like SaaS 70 Type II (a certified SaaS model) and BS 7799 to drive a common framework-based implementation of these policies and back the efforts through third party certification against these standards,” Sabharwal said.

Remote infrastructure management, says a Nasscom and Mckinsey study, is expected to become a $15-billion industry in the next five years. Meanwhile, a study by Springboard Research says the Indian SaaS market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 77 percent over 2006-2010 to reach $165 million at the end of the four-year term. In an attempt to ensure efficient application delivery models, businesses are undergoing a transformation from traditional tools to cloud computing and SaaS models, the study said.

According to Atul Kumar, vice-president (SaaS Operations) of Serena Software, the IT department does not need to maintain systems such as marketing, sales and human resource with the application of SaaS technology. “It frees valuable resources for mission critical applications and projects,” he said.

SaaS vendors, ISVs, telecom and hosting providers are coming together to create a powerful SaaS ecosystem that will accelerate adoption of the technology in Asia, the Springboard study said.

Explaining the rationale behind the growing need for specialised IT solutions in Indian industry, Sabharwal said that in most companies, IT infrastructure cannot keep pace with the demands; thereby driving them to look for an outsourced infrastructure model. The models, he said, are becoming increasingly on-demand, which implies that businesses pay for what they need and have an assurance that they can scale up quickly as their needs grow.

“The phenomenon has gained ground over the last five years. Large outsourcing deals like the one between Bharti Tele Ventures and IBM have acted as a catalyst for other companies contemplating the same move,” he said. The rapid growth of the Indian economy has also acted to make outsourcing more acceptable.

IT solutions are also becoming more sophisticated with large global players like IBM making bigger investments in India and traditional offshore IT players like Tata Infotech, Wipro and HCL also turning their attention to the domestic market.