Microland turns 25, offers hybrid IT infrastructure services

Leading IT services firm Microland Ltd, which completed 25 years of operations, Tuesday announced that it would provide hybrid IT infrastructure services to enterprises worldwide.

Touted to be the country's first of its kind offering, the company rolled out its 4.0 platform to deliver enhanced infrastructure services in the emerging digital world

"With cloud computing, mobility and consumerisation becoming the trend, IT is set to drive transformation in enterprises across industry verticals. Our 4.0 platform can help businesses become agile and innovative through a structured approach towards hybrid IT while improving efficiency of their IT infrastructure through automation and process reengineering," Microland founder chairman Pradeep Kar told reporters on the occasion.

The city-based company, which pioneered networking in the 1990s, transitioned to being the country's first remote infrastructure management services provider and has 2,700 techies, six global delivery centres, including three in India and one each in Britain, West Asia and the US to service 75 global clients.

"Commitment to highest standards of governance and business ethics have enabled us to build strategic partnerships with our customers and technology partners such as Amazon web services, Citrix, Microsoft and VMware," Kar noted.

As an enabling framework to deliver computing as a service rather than a product, hybrid IT provides software and information as a utility over a network spanning enterprises and internet.

"Hybrid IT and enterprise transformation to IT-as-a-service is a challenging task because clients have to change the way they think and approach its architecture, which is service oriented. The offering involves service management, governance and compliance, avoiding vendor or technology lock-ins and integrating best of breed technology environment," Microland chief innovation officer M.S. Rangaraj noted.

Technology and market research firm Forrester estimated that the public cloud services market would grow 18 percent this year to $153 billion and projected a similar growth (18 percent) for the virtual private cloud market to $66 billion from $7.5 billion in 2011 and for the private cloud market to $16 billion from $7.8 billion in 2011.

"Enterprises are realising the value proposition of hybrid IT services, as evident from their spending on them, accounting for over 10 percent of their annual IT budgets on cloud services," Kar added.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has estimated that by 2020, one-third of the IT industry revenues would come from managed services and India would have a 45 percent share in the global market for remote infrastructure management.