Introduction

The Infrastructure Outsourcing (IO) market continues to evolve with offshore suppliers maturing as infrastructure service providers, enabled by remote infrastructure management (RIM) technology. As offshore suppliers mature and reach critical size, they see the need to target larger buyers to keep growing their RIMO practice at a healthy pace. This practice led to convergence of the traditional and offshore models. However, this move meant they had to start playing by rules long established by the traditional players. Offshore suppliers in this emerging scenario may be facing a “crisis of genre” that may restrict their growth unless they can strike a balance between targeting large buyers and staying away from playing according to traditional rules.

This report provides an update of the maturing RIMO market. The RIMO model of infrastructure service delivery gradually emerged as a viable alternative to the traditional infrastructure outsourcing model. As large Indian suppliers started reaching critical mass in IO in spite of the economic slowdown, their client target profile approached that of the MNC suppliers, and forced them to consider traditional rules of IO. Multiple factors helped create a “crisis of genre,” forcing offshore suppliers to deviate from the game-changing innovations they brought to the IO delivery marketplace.

Scope

• Data-driven analysis of the evolution of different models in the IO market
• Analysis of the key differences between infrastructure service delivery models
• Overview of likely offshore RIMO suppliers’ strategies based on their market signals

Contents

This research focuses on understanding the trends in the infrastructure outsourcing marketplace and analyzing the strategies of leading offshore suppliers. The key Insights are presented in three sections: growing maturity of the offshore offerings, shifting rules of infrastructure offshoring, and crisis of genre facing offshore suppliers. For instance, the third section discusses the phenomenon of impending crisis of genre in RIMO:

• The growing maturity of offshore suppliers, adoption of labor arbitrage and change in the buyer’s mindset toward IO create a “crisis of genre,” forcing offshore suppliers to deviate from the game-changing innovations they brought to the IO delivery marketplace
• Offshore suppliers need to balance between building creative IO offering, and respecting the biases of large buyers
• Some of them have started offering differentiated approach to IO service delivery while others are targeting large deals and playing by traditional rules