India targets infrastructure management services

Indian outsourcers already have a large share of outsourced application development and maintenance and are dominant in business process outsourcing. The country is now targeting a larger share of the market for remote infrastructure management services (IMS), and is planning to more than double revenue from these services to $15 billion by 2013.

IMS involves managing an enterprise’s core IT systems, including hardware, software, connectivity, and people. The IMS industry is moving toward a remote delivery model where services are increasing delivered from low-cost locations by service providers and wholly owned services subsidiaries of user companies, according to a report released Thursday by India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).

Customers in the United States and Europe are increasingly willing to outsource IMS to offshore locations, because the data does not move out of the home countries and is only managed remotely, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at sourcing consultancy firm,Technology Partners International (TPI) in Houston, Texas.

In India, IMS business is going both to Indian outsourcers and the Indian operations of large IT services companies, Pai said. Because of the large staff component involved in IMS, there are cost benefits in outsourcing IMS to low-cost, offshore locations such as India, he added.

Research done by management consultancy firm McKinsey for Nasscom suggests that the IMS business could generate between 325,000 to 375,000 jobs in India by 2013, as 70 to 75 percent of the roles in IMS can be moved offshore.

Low-cost locations, including India, have so far captured a mere $6 to 7 billion of the IMS opportunity.

Indian outsourcers have so far learned to price their services on the basis of staff time utilized. They now have to learn more sophisticated pricing that takes into account other parameters such as the amount of computing power being managed, if they are not to risk losing money in the business, Pai said.