BANGALORE: The Indian offshoring success story is a phenomenon that has changed the way business is done globally. And India has constantly innovated to push the outsourcing envelope. After having created Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), we now have another addition to the outsourcing saga: Remote Infrastructure Management Services (RIMS).

RIMS comprise of day to day management of IT infrastructure needs of an organization from a remote location (although services are available that combine remote with on-site). RIMS constitutes management of networks, security, servers, storage devices, applications, desktops and a 24x7 help desk. Increasingly, enterprises worldwide have been waking up to the challenges involved in ensuring the availability and the predictability of their networks and devices -- and have stumbled across this RIMS solution.

Traditionally this need has been fulfilled by in-house teams or outsourced to local as well as large traditional IT services players.

Driving the outsourcing of IT infra is the fact that, technology is changing rapidly and today even SMBs are deploying servers and network storage devices (their 180 GB desktop hard drives are not good enough!). As price of devices fall and technological changes become more rapid, it is labor which maintains the IT infra that has become the single largest contributory factor to costs.

You can see the developing picture: lowered device prices, higher technology quotient, wide usage of technology across industry, compliance requirements, growing shortage of qualified talent, increasing cost of IT infrastructure management, retention issues with IT talent...The answer? Offshore IT infrastructure management to markets where talent is easily available and where tools and processes have been developed to manage your infrastructure remotely.

The good news is that newer trends in technology, such as virtualization and cloud computing are creating win-win situations for the customers as well as for the vendors. These technologies are paving the way to consolidation and standardization of IT infrastructure for global players. The reduction in complexity makes it less risky for the clients to outsource to RIMS vendors.

On their part, vendors have enhanced their capabilities in managing diverse technologies by creating training, to rapidly improve the skill sets of their employees, and are placing a growing emphasis on rigorous quality processes. Additionally, as the industry is maturing, IT infrastructure management tools available in the market have simplified. These tools are integrated with governance features which address the management of multiple vendors.

Beyond the technology and delivery aspect, one significant change these technologies are bringing is that of mindset. CIOs are now more comfortable with the thought of having the IT operations hosted and delivered out of locations outside the enterprise premises and Global Delivery Models are strongly gaining acceptance in the IT infrastructure management domain.

The good news for RIMS adopters is that Indian vendors have been innovating not just on the service front, but on the pricing front as well. Today there are several pricing models to choose from ? device based, outcome based, input based and a combination of all.

Not surprisingly, the mid-sized deals segment of the market has become an important source of growth for RIMS providers.

RIMS is clearly a specialist play. The rigorous processes and operations combined with the critical nature of business makes it imperative for the vendors to specialize. A RIMS vendor focused in this area would be able to provide enhanced quality of service as a result of aligning tools, processes and skill sets to the industry needs.

And to us, the biggest trend is the choice that RIMS adopters are making ? by carefully choosing specialist players over others to manage their infrastructure.

- Anindo Sengupta, Microland