Forrester on Offshore GDM On Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure Management is such an critcal and integral factor in wining outsourcing deals – the challenge and benefits of distributed management augmented by global delivery would become a key factor for all those planning to outsource. This is also a practice that requires lot of maturity in winning and in operations – maintaining service levels. Forrester has just released a report assessing the capabilities of various players in the Infrastructure Management space and the list has included both western & Indian headquartered players.

Hats off to Forrester for
A. Carrying this study and ;
B. More importantly including offshore vendors in the list along with traditional western players

I am seeing analysts very selective in assessing these together ( may be there are some valid reasons). With increasing telecom bandwidth and overall maturity and a sense of comfort in offshoring , infrastructure management would become an important space for vendors to scale up and deliver well. This is also an area where the demand for distribution of facilities and resources outside of India for traditional outsourcing supplier can be high compared to traditional application development / maintenance & consulting. In the last twelve months, a few major deals inside India ( by indian market size) were won by western players, granted some were won by Indian headquartered players as well. Fact remains that diversified and integrated GDM network and strategy are seen in disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) capabilities as well as in extending more flexible support options. The report rightly highlights the current leadership of traditional western players but makes an important observation about their transparency in marketing the capabilities as against that shown by Indian headquartered vendors. In terms of distribution, the report rightly highlights that traditional western players do not offshore much and Indian headquartered players need to have more facilities outside the U.S & U.K besides India( Some are already doing it – but Forrester sees this as limited). A well timed report, I should say when the market is set for a major upswing.I am hoping for a day when independent assessments for savings in respect of major deals can be published and assessed - the dynamics here are very different compared to traditional application outsourcing, here the actual savings can be more accurately computed.