India's top 5 in infra management leaders’ list

MUMBAI: When an employee in Latin America logs on for desktop troubleshooting support or an IT manager sends in a request for a new software installation on a batch of servers in Canada, there’s a fair chance it is being taken care of by an Indian IT firm.

According to the latest Forrester Research report on the rapidly emerging infrastructure management (IM) space, 19 of the firms today manage between them about 15 million desktops, 1 million servers and 740,000 networks for 11,000 organisations across the world.

These 19 firms have been identified as leaders in this category, and all the top 5 Indian IT firms, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Satyam Computer Services, have made it to this list.

“While perhaps not as flashy as iPods, nanotechnology, or service-oriented architecture, IT infrastructure is the plumbling that consumes massive amounts of capital and supports commercial activity in the modern world — and when it falls, everyone pays attention,” it said in its introduction to the study.

Reflecting this reality, infrastructure management as business has grown by 14% for the firms located outside of India and a whopping 71% for Indian firms. Together these 19 global firms account for more than $ 300 billion in revenues. “If all the providers were in a single country — ‘Outsource-istan’ for example — its GDP would rank somewhere between Austria’s and Sweden’s,” research firm Forrester said in the report on global infrastructure outsourcing.

The firms have been rated based on their current offerings, strategy, and market presence. Despite being much smaller than firms like EDS, which topped the list, and IBM, which had a massive 356,000 employees and $ 24.1 billion in infrastructure revenues, TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL also found mention.

“Although dwarfed in overall market presence by giants like IBM, EDS, and HP, HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro showed strong delivery capability, good reference client score and solid value-based strategies for the future,” the study said.

Interestingly, it also noted that several Indian firms were moving past wage-arbitrage and focussing on value-generation. European firms, such as Atos Orgin, LogicaCMG and T-Systems, were rated a notch lower compared to these players, while Satyam was rated as a “contender” in the 19-firm-strong list. Another India-based firm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, was rated on par with the European firms.