Sun bets on managed services

 Pragati Simlote

NEW DELHI: With IT becoming a way of doing business, service has taken a center stage. Managed services in its different forms bring in predictability for the customers and the business.

Managed services give customers tremendous amount of predictability, increases his availability, his investment is protected, allows him to invest at the right time leading to regulation of his spend and overall ensures that IT really does what it is supposed to do that is giving edge to the business rather than becoming a problem.

Globally, services contribute around 36 per cent of Sun Microsystem’s revenue and is a $5 billion business for it. With Indian companies waking up to the fact that IT is a big business enabler and differentiator, the company is betting big on its services portfolio in India, especially the managed operations delivery.

Sun managed operations delivery provides strategic IT planning and deliver the remote IT operations management that allows companies to align their core IT competencies with their critical business objectives. It focuses on the predictive monitoring and management of applications, infrastructure, networks, storage and security systems. This predictive management approach provides companies with a structured set of operations management functions that deliver 24x365 maintenance, administration, tuning and optimization.

According to Sun India managed services country director Joyjit Chatterji, “Key benefits to companies include reduction in operational costs and complexity by augmenting efficiencies, maximizing application availability with remote monitoring and management services that support heterogeneous environments, preventing problems before they impact your business, focus on strategic IT initiatives by augmenting, extending, or refocusing internal operations resources and maintaining agility, choice, and control in contrast to typical outsourcing engagements.”

Without sacrificing the control, an organisation can monitor all its devices. Sun claims that it actually looks at basic indicators and much before a problem occurs upwards of 80 per cent of the cases it is able to prevent it from actually happening.

Sun Managed Operations services consultants place a device called ControlTower in its customer’s data center, or its hosting provider’s data center. ControlTower features receptors that are coded to monitor nearly any piece of infrastructure, anywhere in the world. This scalable technology consists of a Control Tower Appliance that is placed in the customer’s environment and ControlTower servers that are located in Sun’s data centers. Collectively, these tools handle thousands of simultaneous alarms and perform reliably by storing and forwarding data when the Internet is not available.

As a portal to all services, ControlPoint delivers hundreds of on-demand management reports for every monitored device in your infrastructure like monitoring information, incident control and analysis, change control, inventory control and on-demand reporting.

The pricing strategy for managed operations delivery is completely modular and is based on what combination of services a customer opts for. Chatterji said, “The pricing is completely customized for every client depending on the number of assets. We are also trying to have a different pricing for the Indian market. We have already signed up three customers in India for its managed operations delivery, two of which have already implemented this solution.”

To expand its current service delivery capacity, Sun Microsystems India recently launched its third ControlCentre across the globe and the first in the Asia Pacific region in Chennai. The facility is a 24/7 centralized operations centre for managing and monitoring customers' IT infrastructure and processes. The centre would have an initial capacity of 300 skilled engineers who would integrate seamlessly with Sun's other ControlCentres in the US and Europe.

© CyberMedia News