Citius, Altius, Fortus: The Solution Champs of 2013

Faster, higher, stronger has been the evolution of the solution providers; some of them are the India's Solution Champs

The evolution of Dryopithecus (Ape) to Homo Sapiens (Human Being) has changed the law of animal kingdom forever and has been instrumental in shaping the modern world. Likewise, the evolution of the solution providers and their udgradation towards the next level of client servicing is surely to change the way domestic IT services in India has been addressed. Until few years back the domestic services market was insignificant enough for the large Indian IT services players like Infosys or TCS. While it was the successes of the IBMs and HPs that made them realize the potential of the local market, one should not completely overlook the role played by these solution providers too, in encouraging them to venture into Indian enterprises.

Doing hardware business and doing solution business are completely different ballgames. If one is handling Bollywood beauty Katrina Kaif, the other is handling WWE wrestler Khali. Understanding the criticality of providing solutions and services on BI or any business application for that matter, the solution providers have not only developed the required skillsets to deliver such projects but have build well-crafted business blocks around them. Overcoming the fear factor associated with all new ventures and the initial stumbling, the last two years witnessed this thriving business line to slowly pick up and now the market is far more ripe and so are the players, who are gaining better hold of the ground and maturing themselves in providing effective business solutions to their customers.

One common observation associated with all these companies is that none of them parted with their old legacy of hardware reselling business, rather 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 the solution providers, 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. Talking about key trends or practices for last year, data center solutions has been a big area along with remote services. Virtualization and cloud computing are the other popular areas. In fact, many of the solution providers have developed their in-house cloud hosting services and offering it as a third party service. Therefore, many of these solution providers are now competing against the cloud service providers.

Most of these deals and customer profiles strongly showcase the diversified services as well as client verticals that the solution providers have started to address. Apart from government and PSUs, BFSI and financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, telecom, power, import and export has been the key customer segments that attracted most of the leading companies to enter into. Among the hot technologies infrastructure and facility management, remote services, IT consulting, managed security and virtualization are areas wherein these players forayed into last year with increased focus.

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.

‘Solution Champs' tries to identify some of these players in the big league-those who have excelled in a particular technology area or a service. We have identified 10 key solution providers in one particular category. Subsequently, we have profiled 5 of them-their achievements, successes, strategies, deployments among others-and finally out of them one has been annointed the crown of Solution Champ.