Standardize Or Perish

One of the biggest challenges that small and medium businesses face when
dealing with small and medium solution providers is consistency in delivery and
consistency in quality of delivery across different customer sets.

Corporate customers want the same experience from their solution provider,
whether a network is being set-up in Hyderabad or Indore. That is because the
customers' customers want to have the same experience whether they are accessing
services in Delhi or Lucknow.

Productization or standardization of IT service offerings is the new mantra
that is likely to be taken up by entry and mid-level solution providers. There
is no dearth of examples to show that even small time players actually ensured
that consistency in quality and delivery is achieved before they started growing
and some became even big.

According to industry pundits, such as IDC, to standardize or to achieve 75
percent repeatability of services delivered is a good benchmark, and if that is
achieved then productization is successful.

Clearly, solution providers looking for an edge, and keen on beating
competition, will now strive to productize. The success mantra for the next 24
months for bagging new as well as repeat orders and enhancing profitability will
surely be standardization.

The advantages are for the solution providers too. Market research and
surveys clearly indicate that service-level agreements (SLAs) between the
vendors, solution providers and the customer, is likely to be the order of the
day in near future. It will not work without standardization.

Surely, challenges for solution providers, who are already undress pressure,
will go up. Standardisation would require higher levels of expertise from
partners to implement and maintain the solutions. But we must not forget that
while the small players try to win big customers, the big players are now
increasing focus on SMBs, who increasingly want 'productized services' and fast
implementations.

According to IDC, “The market spending on system integration services in
India for 2007 is expected to be around $872 million growing at 19 percent and
contributing to 21 percent of the total IT services market. This change in the
delivery model will not have a huge impact on spending, but will definitely
improve vendor earnings and client confidence from the standardized services
deliverables.”

Ibrahim Ahmad

ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in