Times are getting tougher. A McKinsey study finds that countries in Asia have had to readjust their expectations about the economy, after just the first three months of 2015. CIO.com also noted IT outsourcing trends as not being very promising; organisations are turning towards a hybrid mix of outsourcing and insourcing, as they try to take back more control of their IT organisation.
By all counts, it doesn’t seem to be a good time to be an ITO service providers. It takes a rare breed to be able to buck the trend and turn current industry trends and challenges into opportunities for themselves.
Although the practice of IT Outsourcing (ITO) has been one of the earliest technology services to be provided on a mass scale to organisations, it is still as relevant today as it was before. In fact, it is growing at a greater speed in Malaysia and the surrounding ASEAN region, than in other parts of the world.
So, ITO providers are becoming indispensable, at least in ASEAN, for organisations that are looking for reliable services. Business in ASEAN is about to become fraught with more complexities and opportunities, as ASEAN looks set to become a single economic region by end of 2015. These businesses need a reliable partner to take care of IT, while they themselves take care of business within an ASEAN which is becoming more and more boundary-less.
Being the Indispensable IT Partner
Hitachi Sunway Information Systems (Hitachi Sunway) is one such IT partner with many enterprise customers spanning a wide range of industries. Today, many organisations from public sector, to financial services, healthcare, hospitality and oil and gas, outsource their IT functions to Hitachi Sunway – which is also the first joint venture by Hitachi Systems, Ltd. and Sunway Technology Sdn Bhd in Southeast Asia to provide IT services and solutions.
Armed with at least ten years experience offering integrated managed services (IMS), and 17 years providing data centre services (DS) to different industries with different business needs; Hitachi Sunway is placed in a very good position to meet the high SLAs set out for ITO providers in business functions such as service response, turnaround time, resolution time, systems management, and security, among others.
Over the years, and from acquiring leading capabilities in the market, Hitachi Sunway has established itself as an efficient provider of ITO services, system health checks, analysis, service desk, systems operations, server monitoring, escalation services and more.
Trends and Challenges Ahead
Along with the rest of the industry, Hitachi Sunway has felt the impact of changing trends and also changing business KPIs. Organisations now have to do much more with much less, whilst also be able to efficiently leverage current technologies, just to be able to keep up and remain relevant in the market.
For example, Virtualisation. This isn’t just a buzzword anymore, but has become what organisations seek to implement for their data centres. The cloud-based or virtualised data centre for service items like virtual infrastructure eg virtual servers & networks, reduces support and maintenance costs, as control and management is easier to do, from a centralised location.
This disruptive technology, requires service providers like Hitachi Sunway to competently offer it in terms of skills and delivery, on top of business-as-usual (BAU) services like managed network services, ITO support services and managed server services, which Hitachi Sunway charges a premium for, because these are services governed by ISO policy.
The transition for Hitachi Sunway, has been no less than painful and IT Outsourcing (ITO) services, are not spared during this current state of technology disruption.
Hitachi Sunway’s traditional ITO services like OS patch management is fast became a resource and time intensive endeavour, while its Corporate Desktop procurement services were rendered redundant during this era of Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) that favours tablets, smart devices and mobile computing.
So What Do These New Trends Mean for Hitachi Sunway?
On-premise computing also meant slow and arduous delivery of IT services, as we have to wait months, before we could get the IT hardware that we needed, to our premises first.
How does this new way of delivering IT services impact Hitachi Sunway?
This new way of IT consumption, from capital expense to operating expense, also spells new responsibilities for Hitachi Sunway. To improve cashflow, many corporations are leasing equipment instead of outright purchasing them.
Next Steps: Acquiring New Capabilities, Providing New Offerings
So, what do these new trends like virtualisation and BYOD mean for ITOs? How does cloud computing and this new way of delivering IT services impact them? And as a result - how does the ITO’s relationship with its customers change, or its business model evolve?
To stay ahead of the game, Hitachi Sunway read the sign of the times and equipped themselves beforehand so that it would be better able to step up to the plate, for businesses in Southeast Asia.
The company has been adapting by leveraging automation for example, so that their IT service of ‘operating system patch management’ is replaced by an automated delivery method using software and tools. Their managed desktop services also now include support for new ways of working on tablets and mobile smart devices.
Hitachi Sunway is also embracing cloud computing and software-as-a-service capabilities, and have begun to provide cloud-based solutions, starting with Recovery-as-a-service.
Today, Hitachi Sunway is also looking to the future and are putting steps in place to be able to grow their current capabilities and meet future business requirements.
Currently for example, it is exploring new services that will present opportunity to their customers to reduce their hardware infrastructure footprint. This also presents opportunity for Hitachi Sunway to evolve their relationship with their customers with new pricing strategies and a new enhanced role as a total managed IT provider.
Principals and partners are also included, as Hitachi Sunway identifies the software and solutions, as well as the partners to go-to-market with.
Boosting Up Expert Capabilities
Where possible, capabilities are also acquired. This Hitachi Sunway has done in the space of just a 2 years at most.
Singapore-based I-Net (now known as Hitachi Sunway Network Solutions) is well-known in the market as the expert in network services. Their extensive knowledge in security, network design, implementation, complements Hitachi Sunway’s ITO offerings with Managed Network and Managed Security services.
Also to note, are Hitachi Sunway’s stake in Powerware and acquisition of FreeNet (currently known as Hitachi Sunway Data Centre Services). These two important elements now mean Hitachi Sunway can offer comprehensive, end-to-end data centre solutions, all the way from designing and building, to managing it together with Internet broadband provisioning.
These data centre solutions – managed service, design, implementation and maintenance – are all governed by ISO policy, or more specifically, ISO20000, ISO27001 and ISO 50000. Hitachi Sunway’s unrivalled experience in optimal service delivery, also positions them well to prepare their customers for ISO certification, by applying their established standard operating practices.
With nearly two decades of experience, established skills delivery and competence and the foresight to adapt their people, processes and technologies according to the times, Hitachi Sunway is ready to take their game to the next level, with new, cutting edge services like cloud-enabled managed hosting.
In other words, despite this region being downbeat about the economy(1) and the trend for IT outsourcing taking a downturn(2) Hitachi Sunway will continue to take lead in being an indispensable ITO service provider to its customers and businesses that want to confidently navigate this new and tumultuous technology landscape.
Reference:
1. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/economic_conditions_sn...
2. http://www.cio.com/article/2378979/outsourcing/10-it-outsourcing-trends-...
