5 Infrastructure Trends to Watch for in 2010

The SMBs that traditionally resisted outsourcing will increasingly look at offshoring to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Small and mid-sized enterprises did not previously see a need to off shore their IT infrastructure services or IT operations, as they were able to manage things with a relatively small work force and a reasonable budget. With environments becoming increasingly complex, and pressure mounting to reduce costs, however, the SMB segment is now looking to offshore at least some of their tasks to save money.

SMBs will tend to work with tier 2 IMTS (infrastructure management and technical support) vendors to gain management attention and to have a flexible and agile delivery model. They will initially pilot some monitoring and help desk activity, which are matured offshore services.

Remote production support will gain acceptability.

Remote support is slowly picking up momentum as remote infrastructure management (RIM) providers are looking beyond infrastructure and have started providing production support and remote application support.

It makes sense to have a single partner to provide both application support and IT infrastructure support as they can take ownership irrespective of the problem’s origin. The single service desk operations will help increase the first call resolution as common tier 1 support engineers can resolve simple application and infrastructure issues and can escalate to both application developers and infrastructure specialists comprising of tier 2 and tier 3 support engineers. The single trouble ticketing system (CRM) will speed up the resolution, as well as help build common repository.

The RIM providers have already built platforms, processes and methodologies to handle infrastructure issues and can now seamlessly handle production support with adequate training on applications.

With 24 years of IT experience, Ram Mohan is vice president and the head of Infrastructure Management and Tech Support for MindTree Consulting, managing delivery of this practice across the globe.