The Genesis of SIs

As the domestic IT services market has continued to grow, it has created enough space resulting in the emergence of a new breed of solution providers. What is more interesting is the fact that most of these companies delved into avenues that demands more market maturity and technical expertise woven seamlessly with an integrated service structure to deliver efficient business solutions for their clients. Interestingly, they have not only restricted themselves to emerging enterprises, but increasingly started addressing larger enterprises as well.

If the transformation of the erstwhile box pushers into solution providers was complete by 2010, the last few years have seen the coming of age of the latter as they matured to develop their services offerings as a well-chartered business strategy. Doing hardware business and doing solution business are completely different ballgames. Understanding the criticality of providing solutions and services on cloud or any business application or datacenter management for that matter, the tier-2 players have not only developed the required skillsets to deliver such projects but have built well-crafted business blocks around them.

None of these solution providers have completely parted with their old legacy of hardware reselling business; rather they have aligned their software implementation business surrounding their core strength area in a manner to obtain maximum profit out of the marriage of the two businesses. As pointed out by many of them, apart from giving additional revenue the older reselling business helps in the current solution business in terms of providing a wholesome hardware and software solution to the customers. Inventory is the backbone of reselling business that can be extremely helpful while implementing larger deals that require plenty of hardware installations.

With time the scalability and nature of projects delivered by the solution providers have changed drastically. They have started taking up and delivering large scale and more complex projects for their customers, a capability neatly built over time and with much effort. They have also started actively veturing overseas. Geographical expansions are must now as there are various unexplored territories with lots of opportunities and its up to the solution providers to explore the same as much as possible.

As the delivery portfolio and efficiency enhances, so does expectation and competition. To sustain and thrive in this business it is very important to follow the current market trends and upgrade skills on regular basis to catch up with latest technology and develop solutions around them. Services is an area wherein one has to provide end-to-end solutions to his clients. Therefore, continuous evolution is essential and its now upto these solution providers to see how fast they can shape their way to join in the big league.

(rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in)