Datacraft entered a global service alliance with Cisco for managed network services and bagged large deals in managed services, including MNC banks, and ITeS companies like CTS and Genpact, and leading service providers.

It also deployed the first Cisco WAAS solution, one of the largest in India, for a back office contact center, which was a joint venture between a major US financial giant and a leading Indian ITeS company.

It also entered into a managed network management services contract with India's leading service provider. It won a managed service contract for an additional 1,000 branches of State Bank of India (SBI).

GTL, on the other hand, expanded its existing engagement to large customers such as Asian Paints and also offered management services for product and IT services. In FY '06-07, it added three new insurance companies and one large bank to its customer list.

VERTICAL CONTRIBUTION
The biggest contributor to the NMS segment was the BFSI complete financial vertical including banking, finance, securities, investments and insurance. It has been on a major investment spree with core banking picking up pace. Similarly, insurance companies are also looking at core insurance, because of which they have felt the need for centralizing the entire IT infrastructure and have, therefore, required NMS. The other vertical that contributed heavily to this segment was government.

CHALLENGES
Despite the promising growth, the NMS market faced a number of challenges. The increasing complexity of networks was the biggest of these, which makes monitoring network performance and QoS a challenge. Second, the mindset of the enterprise is not open to spending on NMS. Though the network is a critical component and without it business operations are vulnerable, the cost of network management using standard products and dedicated skilled resources is higher than what organizations would like it to be. From the organizations' perspective, network management services from an NOC using offbeat products would be a good combination.

Another big challenge is the base telecom infrastructure, which is not up to the mark. Moreover, there are SLAs that are in milli-seconds, and today's tools based on MIB polling with 5-minute intervals simply are too slow to manage these types of applications traffic.

WHAT LIES AHEAD
In the future, the NMS segment will see system integrators aligning with service providers to manage enterprise customer networks. A large number of organizations will source some part of their network management and operations to a third-party provider. New services such as application dependency mapping, configuration management, cross-domain analytics, application flow management, out-of-band will gain traction.

Presently, India forms a significant though small part of the global NMS scenario. With globalization and more and more companies aiming to achieve global standards, the NMS market is bound to grow and the potential is large. The growth in the next financial year will be driven by factors such as centralization of processing power, ITIL, multisourcing, WAN optimization and acceleration. In fact, The market is expected to grow to Rs 1,000 crore, which signals a bright future for the industry.

Sonia Sharma
sonias@cybermedia.co.in

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