Production and Non-Production Support : Experience Matters

One of the other challenges in maturing (and this one in the IT services space) has been that most of the IT services companies based out of offshore have traditionally been engaging with customers in supporting their non-production environment and have little experience managing production systems. In any bank or a large manufacturing set up the production environment is sacrosanct and critical for uptime and performance. However the rest of the non-production systems like Development environment, Test Environment, Staging Environment are not deemed as critical as business depend on them as much as they do on production systems.

One of the key reasons for offshore based IT services companies having little experience managing production systems is that most of the offshore based IT service providers grew on a staple business diet of application development and maintenance. This resulted in these companies developing expertise, best practices and propositions in this space. However almost all of these activities are centered around the non-production systems. When their application (or an enhancement) development, test, QC activities are complete, these were typically handed over to the onshore based service providers who would be running the customers’ production systems for deployment. Offshore based IT services companies have had little opportunity to get into the production environment due to this and probably made little effort as that space was being dominated by the strong, traditional outsourcing service providers. It was easier to get the bucks coming in doing the application development and maintenance work, as they had cracked that part of the puzzle but these companies did not venture out in the production environment space.

This has come haunting these companies when they eyed the IT infrastructure services space. In this area the customer requires companies to manage their IT infrastructure environment, most of which is in the production space. In this space, the offshore based IT services companies have had little past experience and understanding of the underlying complexities. Also, the maturity of the IT systems in the local domestic market and those in US and Europe are not the same ( the latter being more mature and evolved over a longer period of time).

This is where, often in opportunities which involve support of production systems, traditionally onshore based providers have an edge as they grew in that space. Offshore based service providers are now inching towards this space with some having made more stride than others --- but clearly this can be generalized for the class as a whole.