Infrastructure Management

Taking the services route

Infrastructure management in India is seeing a shift towards the services model

Infrastructure Management (IM) is finding takers in all industry verticals from telecom to manufacturing to retail/services. Small and medium enterprises are witnessing increased use of IT within their set-ups.

Many infrastructure management vendors in India have a scaled-down version of their enterprise IM product for mid-sized companies. Some are bullish about the potential market for IM solutions among SMBs. The typical SMB requirement for infrastructure management will be for network management, including intrusion detection systems, network usage and bandwidth management—hence there is no need to offer the complete IM pack.

The services model

IM solutions are evolving as they need to manage complex networks and make the whole process simple. These solutions have the ability to correlate events in the network to reduce complexities, identify and isolate faults, and proactively notify an organisation’s IT staff when performance degrades. Most IM solutions can take automated action, and are agile in conducting root-cause analysis.

Earlier, IM in India meant vendors deploying tools within organisations to manage infrastructure. Today, Indian organisations are increasingly moving towards outsourcing IM to a service provider for either remote or onsite management services. This becomes more significant as companies are realising that though IT is a necessity it is not their core focus area. Experts predict that organisations might just move away from the IM model (that concentrated on tools) to the services model.

CIO concerns

The challenge facing CIOs will now be to deliver higher IT service-level performance to meet diverse business needs while lowering the cost of infrastructure. Users have realised that their IT infrastructure has become complex over a period of time as they continue to add different types of servers, storage and software. Besides combining broadband and mobile technologies with e-commerce, companies want to reach customers anywhere and provide all kinds of services, information and marketing formulas.

By running supply-chain and logistics systems over their networks, companies seek to integrate partners, outsourcers and suppliers into their operations. Portals and collaboration software can allow employees to use the same systems wherever they go. 

The main concern CIOs have is whether they will make sufficient progress in building flexible infrastructure, and whether it can be achieved with today’s technologies. Or will new problems result in delays, raise costs and cast doubts on the entire effort? Adding to the uncertainty are problems that commonly trouble CIOs—management and employee resistance, difficulties finding the right technical talent at a reasonable wage, and vendors who can’t deliver what they promise.

In India, awareness of the ITSM and the ITIL framework has also led to the adoption of infrastructure management. This has largely been fuelled by the efforts of IM vendors in the market who have educated customers on the merits of adopting ITIL-based ITSM. Even though initially confined to companies offering infrastructure and service management services, it has gradually begun to see adoption by non-IT companies too.