Symantec bets on outcome-based services

PUNE, INDIA: Symantec, IT infrastructure management and security technologies provider, is ready to bet on the new market Outcome-Based-Services (OBS).

“Today, the value of a product does not lie in what it is or how it is implemented but how it is applied. Seventy per cent of IT solutions fail to deliver on ROI, while vendors provide product components such as expertise, networks, servers and databases, but not solutions in themselves. Enterprises need to go beyond fragmented offerings,” said Sudesh Prabhu, country head for Enterprise Services, Symantec India.

“Annual maintenance Charges (AMCs) are more of reactive support. There is no ownership of value realization. AMCs are fixes and hence services based on outcomes can squeeze out more value for a customer than traditional means,” Prabhu added.

OBS is an addition to Symantec’s services vertical and fills a gap in what customers buy and what they get, he explained.

“Normally, once implementation is done, the vendor gets off the site and customer realization gets limited due to various factors. OBS takes ownership of the solution by sustaining it with end-deliverables.”

The proposition apparently makes business sense too. Commenting on how the new model is attractive for business, Prabhu outlines customer ease, assurance and shorter sales cycles as major upshots.

“This makes buying easier for customers, he gets the assurance that he will get what he is paying for. This knocks off the usual negotiation for commodity products. Sales cycle too goes down,” he said.

Symantec has been experimenting with this route in some form or the other in the last two years in the international waters and has modeled it with the right buying program in the last six months.

It is ready to dive into India now with certain key accounts.

“We would go with certain customers, as per a given bandwidth and infrastructure precedent. The concept has been received very well specially in segments like SSIs and telcos,” said Prabhu.

“The degree varies. In certain operations there is transfer of risk from customer’s shoulders to service provider’s. For instance, in a DR (Disaster Recovery) case, the customer can choose to go for a deterrent model or a penalty-driven one.”

But everything is weighted and customer pays for it. The service criteria in this model so far spans parameters like data protection, data continuity, data archival while the company is next getting into security process management and security incident management in a short time.

Incidentally, this model works hand-in-hand with the SaaS concept as there is a requirement of correspondingly suitable buying programme.

Whether the model blends with existing license one is still an untrodden path.

“We have not tried that so far. If new customers can pose opportunity for suitable buying program, then this could be tried out but not for existing ones as it’s not practical to mix and match a traditional solution with a new initiative like this,” he said.

As to how the model is different from strategic outsourcing, he responds that the latter is more directed at bringing costs down but OBSs are more deliverable-centric.