—By Sunil Mahale, VP, APAC Global Markets, Hitachi Data Systems
Leading Indian GSIs – a group that includes the likes of TCS, Wipro, HCL and Infosys, among others – have their sights trained on the APAC market (including Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and India) and with good reason. As companies in this region seek to gravitate from legacy systems towards new usage-driven models for core IT infrastructure, it presents a scenario ripe with opportunity for GSIs.
The worldwide IT outsourcing market has been growing steadily by all estimates. According to Gartner, it touched $288 billion in 2013, a 2.8 percent increase from 2012. Gartner also predicts a 5.4 percent CAGR in this market through 2017.
In the APAC region, many of the global technology trends spanning cloud, mobility and big data management are likely to influence corporate decision-making. APAC companies will largely follow the global trend of streamlining their IT cost structures while seeking to future-proof their investments in this area as much as possible.
As specialists who both understand today’s converged infrastructure solutions and can provide services for Infrastructure and applications wrapped around this, the Indian GSIs are in a good position to help APAC businesses reconfigure and optimize their IT infrastructure.
A large number of GSIs are responding to the specific needs of customers through tailored offerings that mix innovation with flexibility. As a priority, many of them are helping the customers set up cloud-based solutions, in order to handle a wide range of data-related tasks from management to analytics.
Since many companies now prefer consumption-based pricing for IT infrastructure and associated applications, GSIs can work with their infrastructure partners to configure the right system for the client – one that may involve a private or a hybrid cloud model. From the client’s point of view, the utility pricing for both the infrastructure and the services bundled with it, works well in terms of cost management.
With years of domain expertise under their belt, many GSIs are finding ways to optimize cloud services for specific industry verticals. This can be an important consideration for businesses that have unique data management needs.
Organizations in the telecommunications sector, for example, can harness big data for better insights into their operations and to build smart networks. A leading Indian GSI recently worked with an Australian telecom and media company to develop a new enterprise IT incident and service ticketing platform for the latter. The platform enabled the Australian company to reduce the cost and complexity of managing IT issues while creating a unified solution to replace or integrate dozens of applications, including legacy ticketing solutions.
In the retail sector, big data can help generate valuable insights for personalization and improving the impact of marketing campaigns. A global retail giant seeking to better leverage this aspect, recently signed a wide-ranging IT infrastructure contract with an Indian IT services company. The agreement allowed the retailer to free up their internal resources and significantly improve both its IT operations and marketing effectiveness.
With such targeted and custom offerings, GSIs will be in a better position to price their services based on outcomes, a strategy that will boost both long-term profitability and growth prospects.
In all of this, it helps the cause of GSIs to align themselves with the right technology partners. It is clear that flexibility and scalability are important considerations for customers in making their IT decisions. In a large-scale outsourcing project, clients may already be tied to certain technology platforms that they are not willing to jettison or replace. When GSIs partner with open systems vendors who can build on existing client infrastructure, the cost and effort of migration is greatly reduced for the client. This makes the project an easier sell for GSIs.
Since infrastructure development is a critical focus area in many APAC countries, GSIs can consolidate their positions in these countries by working with partners that offer sustainable and cutting edge technology solutions designed for this purpose.
When the backbone of IT infrastructure being deployed is completely reliable and reasonably priced, it gives GSIs more room for developing and offering higher impact services to their clients. These could involve unique and differentiated applications aimed at enabling data warehousing, sharing, analysis or social innovation. Ultimately, services like these will give APAC enterprises the competitive edge they are looking for, to compete in the global market. It will also move the Indian GSIs they work with into a different sphere – in terms of their effectiveness and their ability to enable client datacenter transformation.
(The story was first published on CXOtoday.com)