CIOs need to move quickly with remote platform based managed services

—Ram Mohan C

Executive Vice President and Global Head, Infrastructure Management Services (IMS), Mindtree

Ram Mohan C, Executive Vice President and Global Head, Infrastructure Management Services (IMS), Mindtree talks to Dataquest on the IMS landscape, and its re-emergence as a critical aspect of cutting edge innovation and service delivery, and how Mindtree sees opportunity in this space. Excerpts

How is the performance of Mindtree in the IMS space and what is its revenue contribution in the company’s overall revenue?

Mindtree’s IMS business has been the fastest growth driver for the last 8 years. Today, IMS is 18.7% of the total Mindtree’s revenue and continues to grow robustly.

Right from the beginning, we focused on a platform based production support. With the state-of-the-art NOCs (We have 8 of them), ITIL based process and ISO 20K and 27K certifications, we focused on applistructure, ie, combining both application and infrastructure support. We ensured that the business owner need not be tossed between application and infrastructure services. As a single point of contact for business users, Mindtree’s IMS handles L1 support for Application and L1 to L3 support of Infrastructure.

Having gained excellent knowledge on production support, we also included scheduling, build and release management under our portfolio. Now we have introduced DevOps model of operation so that our customers gain from increased automation, instrumentation of solutions into releases to significantly reduce re-occurrence of problems.

What would be the company’s strategy in capturing the growing importance of platforms and IPs?

We believed in platform based support right from the inception of our IMS business.

Our own IP, MWatch is an integrated application and infrastructure monitoring and management platform with high focus on automation. Using shift left methodology, we are able to improve efficiency and productivity YoY. With a combination of VMUnify and MWatch, we are also able to provide robust and scalable cloud and on-premise production support.

How do you think the Indian market different foresee the infrastructure management market in India and how the Indian market different from the global one?

I think the mindset of the Indian CIOs need to change and they need to move quickly with remote platform based managed services. They have relied too long with on-premise staff augmentation. While platform based remote infra-management may not bring significant cost advantage to the Indian market, CIOs will definitely see a significant improvement in efficiency and productivity improvement.

Globally, CIOs have embraced the remote platform based infra management successfully and the Indian IT needs to embrace this quickly as well. Too much reliance is still there on onsite staffing, which should reduce.

What are the business opportunities?

I think IMS in India will grow significantly in a few more years.

What are the new trends in infrastructure management?

The core mantra now is ‘the need to do more for less’. Thus, platform based services focus on automation and instrumentation, shared services, and demand for steep reduction in incidents and cloud infra management capability is core to be successful in future.

Following are some trends which will be seen in future:

• Secure private and hybrid cloud implementation and management
• Moving non-core apps, development and testing to public cloud
• Cloud apps and infra management
• DevOps way of management
• Automation and Instrumentation
• Shared Services
• Applistructure Management (Combined Infra and Apps Management)
• Ops Intelligence for feedback and improvement of QoS