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While talking to an industry veteran recently, I asked him to enumerate some
business trends that solution providers should start thinking about keeping
their future growth in mind. He suggested strategic outsourcing.
This term has been used in several presentations by vendors when they are
exhorting their partners to look at total acquisition of their customer. What it
simply means is that your customer outsources his entire IT infrastructure to
you. Even more simply it means that you become the owner of that infrastructure.
You will decide what applications are redundant and need to go, which new
ones need to be added, what new elements fit in best for the entire network, how
to ensure network uptime with the right kind of products and make the
infrastructure a lean and mean machine with high return on investment (RoI) and
low total cost of ownership.
So, the customer pays you a certain amount for the contract period and you
look after their infrastructure. This makes sense because handling IT
infrastructure is your core competency and not that of your customer. You and
not your customer are technically qualified to gauge what are the best solutions
suited for their existing business and the ones that are needed as they scale
their business.
The customer can engage with a SP for a contract of few years. Once the
contract is over, the customer can review the RoI of following this option and
decide if he wants to continue the engagement or if he is better off handling
the entire network in-house.
Theoretically, this makes sense. Already there are cases where SMB customers
have outsourced segments of their infrastructure to their SPs. When I spoke to
other SPs, they were intrigued by this concept. But there are some classic
hurdles, which have to be considered when it comes to strategic outsourcing.
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| vinita bhatia |
One is the age-old trust dilemma. Just how willing are customers to outsource
their entire IT infrastructure, which has emerged as their business' backbone,
to a third party? Similarly, unless you are privy to the internal management
plans for business scalability, how will you determine which are the best
solutions that can keep pace with these plans?
Also, there are very few SPs who offer the entire plethora of solutions. So,
if you have to plug in some solution, like power, which might not be your domain
area of expertise, you will have to involve another SP. In such a case you are
exposing the client's network to yet another party.
While strategic outsourcing is an economical model for SMB customers- freeing
them of the hassle of having an IT team and letting them focus on their core
business areas-it is also a challenge getting them to accept this new business
model.
If you are looking at offering holistic solutions then yes, this is a great
new trend. You can start engaging with small SMBs who have difficulty managing
their in-house IT teams to consider shifting to this model. But be sure to have
a well documented service level agreement in place before you opt for it and dot
all the I's and cross all the T's.
Think about it.
vinita bhatia
(vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in) Page(s) 1
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