India : IBM, HP shortlisted to manage Microsoft s $700 mn IT deal.

Byline: Mamta03

Multinational outsourcing firms IBM and HP have been shortlisted for around $700 million contract for managing Microsoft s global network of desktops, servers and other IT infrastructure, as the world s biggest software maker seeks to lower its operational costs and focus better on its core business. India s top outsourcing vendors had also bid for this contract, but they lost out to the multinational rivals who have better global footprints and are even ready to take over assets including Microsoft s staff.

This was one contract where most of us were bidding hard, especially given the kind of customer we are talking about, but global service providers seem to have taken a lead, said a senior executive at one of the tech firms involved during early stage of bidding. Another person based in US, and familiar with this contract said that Microsoft had issued a global request for proposal (RFP) few months ago for this contract. Officials at Microsoft India did not respond to an email query sent by ET on Thursday.

The global IT infrastructure market has been growing exponentially over past few years. The top 15 vendors analysed by Forrester in a recent report provided remote and onsite services for about 16.7 million desktops, 1.7 million servers and 23.4 million users globally. These vendors, including IBM, HP-EDS , CSC and some Indian tech firms delivered $83.9 billion worth of infrastructure services last year. Some clients clearly will require the scope only an IBM or HP can deliver, but many don t , said Dr Paul Roehrig, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

All of the India-centric firms included in the study Cognizant, HCL Technologies, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro have excellent forward-looking strategies for the infrastructure business, he added. On their part, Indian tech firms such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro have made substantial progress in gaining market share when it comes to application development, maintenance and back office outsourcing, however outsourcing of computer hardware maintenance is an area where multinational rivals still lead. In areas where infrastructure can be managed remotely, Indian vendors are as good as anybody else, however there are certain pieces of infrastructure management such as end user computing where they do not have enough global resources, said Siddtharth Pai, MD of outsourcing advisory firm TPI India.

Copyright : Euclid Infotech Pvt. Ltd.

Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company