Sun to foray into managed services

Sun Microsystems has announced its intention to foray into managed services in the telecommunication sector in India.

The corporation, which has been providing robust platforms for telecom services in this booming market, is in talks with three service providers in the country to offer its managed services.

This move by Sun in India comes close on the heels of IBM bagging a $750 million network infrastructure management deal from Bharti Telecom.

Speaking to Business Standard, Kapil Sood, director (telecom), Sun Microsystems India said: "Telecommunication network consists of three main elements "" Operational Support System, which is the heartbeat of a network, Service and Content Delivery Platform besides the Business Support System such as the billing and customer care. We have been involved in all these segments by offering our hardware for effective functioning of the telecom service providers and now we are getting into managed services. In this foray, we will focus on offering our services in the Service and Content Delivery Platform and Business Support System."

Sood added that discussions are on with three service providers in India and they intend to sign the deal in an year's time.

Managed services is being increasingly sought after by many corporations faced with the daunting task of efficiently operating their complex information technology environments.

Enterprises continue to make strategic investments in new infrastructure to augment their existing legacy platforms while simultaneously managing the demands that both employees and customers place on these systems.

As a result, the process for making an investment decision about how to effectively and efficiently manage and operate this environment can be quite difficult.

The decision-making process involves a broad range of factors, including how scalable the infrastructure should be to support customers; how quickly a particular technology may become obsolete; and whether to manage these IT systems in-house or turn to an outside vendor to meet a customer's unique needs.

By outsourcing key IT activities, corporations can focus on their core competency of increasing their business and with the Indian telecom industry rapidly growing by registering a whopping 14 per cent growth during 2003-04, these kind of outsourcing services are getting more prominence.

"This is an emergent area. To achieve competitive advantage, your business must be cost effective, agile and able to create and sustain customer satisfaction and loyalty. IT departments and commercial IT service providers are under increasing pressure to manage complex, heterogeneous environments with ever-tightening budgets, dwindling resources and increased security issues," noted Sood.

Although the nature of the engagement may vary in terms of assets and staff, managed services from a third party alleviate many a customer's burdens by taking over the operations "" including management, monitoring and maintenance "" of systems and datacentre infrastructure.

Said Sood: "Thirty per cent of our revenues comes from telecom vertical. We have competency in this sector and a foray into managed services makes sense. The deal we are negotiating with telecom service providers can be in the range of upwards of $50m."