The Next Boom in Indian Outsourcing “Infrastructure Outsourcing” this going to be the next big wave in outsourcing. While Indian IT companies at present are handling infrastructure outsourcing work worth more then $1 billion, this figure is expected to touch more then $8 billion by 2010.

Research completed by Everest a global offshoring advisory firm, most of this work will come to the IT majors Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), HCL Technologies, Wipro and Satyam. "The potential of this segment is huge and Indian companies should be able to get outsourcing contracts worth $8.8 billion by 2010, which is a conservative estimate.

The market’s expected to go up to $30 billion by 2015-2020. This segment has the potential to create employment for millions of graduates in India," said Everest Group founder and CEO Peter Bendor-Samuel. The other companies, which are expected to get a significant chunk of the infrastructure outsourcing pie, include Cognizant and Infosys Technologies. While Wipro has entered into a strategic alliance with networking major Cisco to build IT infrastructure service solutions, combining the latter’s networking solutions with its own infrastructure and managed services portfolio, HCL Technologies is following a different model, called co-sourcing. Under the co-sourcing model, the client retains strategic portion of operations like technology refresh, policy definition and architecture issues while HCL, which operates in the remote infrastructure management space through its Infrastructure Services Division (ISD), takes over day-to-day running of operations and other areas as defined by its client.

The company counts infrastructure services among its fastest growing service lines. According to an Everest whitepaper, service providers should focus more on governance tools that include applications governing the IT operations with service-level guidelines and providing business transparency of the IT effort. Infrastructure management (IM) tools, which are a set of applications helping manage the functioning of IT infrastructure including storage devices and networks, provide significant operational benefits but are unlikely to provide competitive advantages, Everest has said. Stating that the governance tools market is not well served in key functional capabilities and the majority of buyers using such tools to manage relationships are not satisfied, the whitepaper advocates strategic investment in governance tools to create crucial competitive edge.