Coming next: Offshoring of IT infrastructure management?

CIOs should recognise that Indian IT remote management capabilities have matured sufficiently to offer high quality services for managing IT infrastructure at reduced cost -- and that this is now a realistic option for small and medium sized businesses.

Cambridge, UK (PRWEB) July 23, 2004 -- Until now, full outsourcing -- where a 3rd party takes over and possibly acquires the IT infrastructure of a company - has been considered to be the only real option for reducing IT infrastructure management costs. But technology advances and improvements in networking costs and speeds are such that seamless remote management from low cost locations is now a practical possibility.

For medium-sized enterprises in particular, this is an exciting opportunity. In the past, full outsourcing by smaller companies to a big player was unattractive. But now the opportunity exists for these businesses to benefit from services delivered from places like India through new and nimble partners such as Optimacy Solutions. These offer even greater cost savings and service-level improvements than those claimed for large outsourcing deals with big players.

But can India today offer the IT infrastructure management capabilities of the big players to smaller customers?

We have inspected and assessed many Network Operations Centres in India, says Optimacys CEO, Radha Mocherla, a former MD of a Fortune 500 subsidiary who has had first-hand experience of working with Indian IT suppliers across the spectrum. I am most impressed with the way local capabilities have been developing in the last few years. We saw the same thing happen in Application outsourcing. Western companies were initially concerned about managing offshore software development projects, but Indian suppliers grew in their abilities and many companies today dont think twice about this aspect of Offshoring."

These sentiments are echoed by others in the team. "My own previous experience of outsourcing to India has been a positive one",says Keith Baxter, the Chief Technology Officer of OPTIMACY, who held the same post at Tesco, the UK retailing giant and a top 10 consumer of IT services. Whilst at Tesco, Keith was responsible for the IT infrastructure across UK and Ireland and was personally involved in offshoring significant chunks of work to India whilst working as the Supply Chain Account Manager. "Now that I have seen it for myself, I see no reason why most elements of IT infrastructure management should not also be offshored" Keith is working with OPTIMACY's technical team to complete a seamless delivery platform that covers all the infrastructure elements such as Network devices, Servers, Databases, Storage and Applications, built around ITIL based best practices.

Whilst companies have balked at totally outsourcing their IT to a major player, selectively out-tasking the management of IT infrastructure is now a very real option both to save money (Optimacy claims typical savings of 20-50% of existing costs) and, perhaps more importantly, to gain access to both top quality skills and the latest systems management technologies.

But there are real risks in Outsourcing let alone Offshoring" says, Optimacys Director for Enterprise Markets, Edward Ben-Nathan, previously a marketing executive with IBM, and not every company has the capabilities or the resources to manage this process. Our aim is to minimise these risks for our customers by working with a range of hand-picked Indian suppliers to seamlessly provide an integrated offering. To do this yourself you would need strong services engineering, project management, vendor management skills and, of course, the ability to overcome the cultural differences. Optimacy removes all of these headaches and yet offers the full benefits of Offshoring"

Optimacy Solutions offers remote IT infrastructure management services based on offshore delivery capabilities. The services cover all elements such as network devices, servers, storage, databases and applications, providing support round the clock as required. Optimacy offers a unique combination of being a UK company with deep Infrastructure consulting and project management capabilities delivering Remote services with an Indian cost structure. For more information please visit the OPTIMACY website at http://www.optimacysolutions.com or e-mail info@optimacysolutions.com or telephone +44 (0)845 226 9065.

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