BANGALORE, INDIA: Frontier Business Systems Pvt. Ltd., an IT infrastructure solutions and services company, has been offering its customers the complete portfolio of solutions and services required to design, deploy and manage complex IT infrastructure environments. 

Last year, Frontier added Virtualization consulting, solutions and services technology to its professional services portfolio. “Virtualisation has been rated by Gartner as amongst the top strategic technologies for 2009. Frontier promotes a “virtualization vision” which emphasizes running virtual infrastructure as a platform. This holistic approach addresses the interdependent impacts of virtualization across the server, storage, network, and security infrastructures.  We have now added Virtualisation Technology to our professional services portfolio,” says Ravi Verdes, director of Frontier  Business Systems.

Frontier, a Rs.. 202 crore company, would be providing virtualisation services from desktop to data center ( server, storage, desktop and applications) for its customers in the area of consulting, planning and assessment, server and storage consolidation, integration and deployment and monitoring and management.

Giving more details about the company, Verdes says: “We are into  engineering IT infrastructure solutions and services. We help design the path and the whole IT set up required for our customers.  If an organisation lacks skilled manpower, we also provide engineers to run the set up under our Infrastructure Services Management. Our solutions and services meets all the conceivable requirements in enterprise IT environments.” 

With services becoming hugely dominant, going forward we are looking at how to keep growing our revenues from services, he adds. 

Virtualization here to stay
“Today, virtualization is one of the key technologies. We took a call about this a year back and decided to invest heavily in virtualization. We have created a separate mascot for our virtualization business. As we got along, we started beginning to understand the benefits of virtualization. It helps reduce the number of servers, reduce space, manpower, energy and even the annual maintenance cost on the servers,” Verdes explained.

Adding further, he said: “Previously, we only talked of desktop virtualization. Today it has moved into servers, storage and networking as well. As we had the required skills in each of these domains, we decided to expand from desktop to the data centre. We have tied up with various vendors, where we bring together all their products and offer as a solution.” 

“Since virtualization is a nascent technology, everyday there is a new discovery about it. People are actually beginning to see the benefits of it,” he adds.  

“In the US, the virtualization business is very matured, whereas in India, it just happened about two years back. From the Indian context, even when you talk about slowdown and people being careful about spending money, the feedback we have about virtualization is that everyone we speak to is interested in this technology. But the gap is about the right knowledge on this technology, on 'How do I go about it'. The other issue is that  people want to see that somebody else takes the lead first and then they will try out anything new,” says Verdes. 

In order to enhance the knowledge on this technology, we have been doing a lot of proof of centres (POCs), where we demonstrate the technology. Frontier has also done quite a number of roadshows and the interest had been huge. In spite of slowdown, quarter on quarter, Frontier is growing at least 20 percent in this business, he adds. 
Road ahead
Verdes says: “We are just a year old in the virtualization business. In terms of skills, we are just 7/10. We have been identified as on of the best partners of VMWare in the country. There is a lot of learning that still needs to be done. Besides customers, we have also realised that there are  a lot of people of our profile, who do not have the required skills. So we are looking at aligning with them to take the benefits of virtualization to their customers. 

Frontier has also planned to have monthly live sessions on virtualization at its data center starting February. “We will conduct sessions for a group of 10 people from the same industry vertical, who will have some issues in common. We will demonstrate and let them feel the product,” Verdes explained. 

“We are looking at services in a big way. Even in times of slowdown, we have seen keen interest in Infrastructure Managed Services, which can be both on-site (where we post a engineer on site) and off-site (where we manage it remotely). We have seen the on-site population growing close to 20 percent month on month.  This also reduces investment on a new technology,” he notes. 

In tandem with IBM, Frontier will also be coming out with a tool which will evaluate the IT investments of a customers. “This tool helps you know the capacity of your infrastructure, whether you can do with the existing ones or if you need to add on to it. It helps in building a road map for your technology requirements and also helps in making sensible investments and business decisions. In all, this tool helps you understand whether you have made your investments wisely and if you are making the best use of it. It's a crucial area in these times, where every rupee spent is questioned,” says Verdes. 

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