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Reactive IT sees a proactive shift

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CIOL Bureau
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PUNE, INDIA: Of the typical 60 to 70 per cent of a CIO's budget that gets pumped into running and maintaining an infrastructure (while the rest goes into a new project or larger implementation), the support slice is gradually but increasingly witnessing a shift. And this one is towards being proactive.

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As Vikas Arora, director, Enterprise Services, Microsoft India, distills from his experience, about two to three years back, most of the support services were reactive in nature. "Today, about 75 per cent of our support delivery within the support slice is proactive."

And the adoption is not just visible on international enterprises. Indian CIOs too are speeding up on proactive support adoption in the last two to three years, he adds. "The mix between reactive and proactive support services is changing here as well. Of the over 250 customers we have on the overall support segment, many are getting more keen on the proactive flavour of services."

According to a research conducted by Forrester Consulting, it has been found that proactive IT services and support help organizations drastically reduce downtime, save costs on re-work and improve mean-time-to-repair. This has been found to enhance an organization’s business reputation, speed to market, customer service and overall profitability.

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Proactive services revolve around identifying problem areas in advance through dynamic reporting, symptom tracking and risk assessments. It's more like a routine health-check and diagnosis by a health expert compared to an incident-based treatment or surgery when a doctor has to react to a disease or problem.

In an IT scenario a proactive approach covers problem tracking, review, data analysis, trouble shooting and warning identification. It also includes 'common problem comprehension' to understand common problems and mistakes made by administrators and also 'supportability comprehension' which covers supportability best practices.

As Arora cites, "At Microsoft, we have seen several customers turning to proactive IT services and health checks to ensure a hassle-free IT environment and smooth implementation of new deployments and projects."

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Among some Indian examples, Evalueserve, Marico etc are notable ones that have tried and adopted the proactive approach.

Evalueserve, as per Microsoft, has opted for proactive IT support services across aspects like health check, risk assessment program and knowledge transfer to ensure quick response, stability and high availability of Evalueserve’s IT setup.

Marico, on the other hand, leveraged proactive IT support on a new technology project aimed at offering business intelligence capabilities to Marico’s sales and marketing team.

"With this, Marico was able to ensure a strong back-end support spanning across strategic planning, designing and development, to the final deployment. All product-related issues were addressed as they rose through the implementation stage, as a result of which Marico was able to minimize errors."

Microsoft Services, which is the consulting, technical services and support arm of Microsoft, handles the work towards making the entire lifecycle of technology implementation easier and helping organizations optimize their IT solutions, Arora explains.