The Hindu Business Line : Cognizant dedicated centre for infrastructure management

COGNIZANT Technology Solutions, principally an applications outsourcing company, over the last few quarters has laid special thrust on its IT infrastructure outsourcing and the company is bullish on this space. It is set to grow this practice by establishing a dedicated centre and inducting more experts.

This relatively new practice covers the entire IT infrastructure lifecycle spanning all elements of IT from data centres, network and communication infrastructure, storage to desktops.

The Head of IT Infrastructure practice at Cognizant, Mr. Sean Narayanan, said "we are setting up a dedicated Global Operations Centre (GOC) for IT infrastructure management. Our GOC and tool-based approach are designed to provide a significant component of the Infrastructure services from our offshore development centres in India. We are recruiting across the board from IT operations engineers to highly skilled system administrators to meet our customer needs."

"Our services range from infrastructure portfolio rationalisation and consolidation, design, deployment and installation to remote management and monitoring ongoing services, as well as platform migration, upgrades and enhancements and IT help-desk services," Mr Sean Narayanan said responding to Business Line.

The company has begun to invest in terms of people, infrastructure, software and hardware resources for its IT infrastructure outsourcing offering. It has built a dedicated team of over 200 infrastructure professionals who are currently delivering these services to 16 of its global customers, primarily in the US and Europe. These clients save on costs through onsite-offshore delivery and innovation through subscription - based or transaction-based service delivery and pricing models.

"Today our existing customers are expanding the current scope of outsourcing with us. For a global retail client, we have forged a strong relationship through infrastructure solutions ranging from architecture design to a total end-to-end IT outsourcing solution, where we are managing their entire IT infrastructure at two critical locations in an onsite-offshore model. Our differentiated pricing, which could be subscription-based or transaction-based, is well received by our customers," Mr Narayanan said.

The company's offshore global operations centre is being scaled up to deliver `shared services' to clients.