By Dr. P. K. Mukherji and Amit Singh

Evolving Trends in RIM

·Global MNCs such as IBM, HP and Accenture will continue to dominate the large accounts due to :

    ·Existing large customer base and relationships
    ·Ability to provide end-to-end solutions including taking over customer assets
    ·Criticality of infrastructure facilities making CIOs hesitant to try out new providers 
    ·Most MNC's will aggressively scale up their offshore presence and pass down the benefit to their customers

·Ability to move from labor arbitrage to value creation and implement global delivery and 'right sourcing' model.

·Offshore providers like TCS, Cognizant will aggressively grow their service offering and register large growth rates. They will setup their data centers and NOC in U.S. and Europe, either through organic growth or M&A, to gain customer confidence. They will have a strategy to address the SMB sector to increase their customer base.

·As RIM market matures and a few of the functions become commoditized business, scale of operation will become critical for broad based service provider. Niche players have to focus on specific verticals (for example, telecom-service management).

·As more and more functions in infrastructure management become commoditized, major providers will be competing to support business transformation based on their outsourcing footprint and use IT sourcing as enabler for broader business value generation such as local market penetration and global value chain support.

·Focus areas will continue to be offshore helpdesk, network management and database management with more thrust moving from plain operations coverage to performance management, quality improvement, design and lifecycle.  Emerging areas will be utility/on-demand/shared services. One of the most significant of these new models is Infrastructure as a Service, an on-demand solution that integrates hardware, software and services. Variabilizing the IT delivery model will allow the company to easily scale operational expenses up and down according to business needs.

·Move toward server and storage virtualization will enhance the viability of remote monitoring and management of the infrastructure. Tools to do more remote takeover of PCs will become more mature, for example, Intel's new enterprise platform, vPro, enables hardware to respond to management commands even when the PC is locked up or powered off. Such developments will further accelerate RIM growth. 

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Pradeep is the President and Managing Partner of Avasant's (formerly Stradling Global Sourcing) Asian operations. He has over 20 years of experience and expertise in consultancy and management of technology business, and has advised leading global enterprises on strategic aspects of services globalization and transformational Outsourcing.

Amit is a Partner with Avasant (formerly Stradling Global Sourcing)  in Los Angeles. He has extensive experience in outsourcing strategy, financial modeling and leading strategic outsourcing initiatives for IT and business processes with a focus on enterprise applications.