RIM: Indian market yet to understand the genre

BANGALORE, INDIA: RIM as an industry can realize $26-28 billion in revenue by 2013, with India capturing as much as 50-55 per cent share of this, according to McKinsey & Company.

However, does India, as a market, understand the genre, remote infrastructure management, which is touted to be the next big offshore opportunity for India after application development and maintenance (ADM) and BPO?

“Everybody for the sake of competition want to do something new and unique at a short span of time and jump into remote infrastructure management services. However, the Indian market will take another couple of years to learn from its mistakes and grow,” says Girish Krishnamurthy, managing director, Kaseya India. He was talking to Deepa Damodaran of CIOL in an interview. Excerpts:

CIOL: There are several RIM service providers in the country. Is that a good or bad news?

Girish Krishnamurthy: The whole IT ecosystem is extremely confused about the whole concept called remote infrastructure management. Awareness is less but everybody wants to jump into the wagon, in the rat race to do something new, unique and be the first.

Even before understanding the whole concept of managed services, or automated services or remote service, companies have started providing it in the form of software as a service (SaaS). However, one has to understand that no one can provide SaaS unless product companies can offer a software as a service.

The only service that companies can provide today is IT as a service. Even here, the market needs to understand the technology that goes behind the concept of IT as a service.

The market needs to analyze what had happened to the rest of the world and take it as a pointer and localize RIM for the Indian market.

CIOL: How should then a company brace itself to manage IT assets?

GK: Today a lot of people treat automation management and remote infrastructure management as equivalent. Whereas, it is not the case. There are five building blocks to manage IT assets effectively. They are:

Automatically: This is called automatic managed services. It helps reduce human errors. The developments in this area lead us closer to the dream of autonomic computing or self-healing technologies, and intelligent tools.

Systematically: IT assets has to be managed systematically.

Logically: IT has to be proactively managed as per the requirement of a business.

Remote Infrastructure Management: i.e managing IT assets from a remote location. 

Securely: Security issues need to be taken care of.