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By Dhaval Valia
Remote Infrastructure Management Services (RIMS) is becoming the flavor of the season, and the latest channel partner to bet on it is Hyderabad-based Choice Solutions. The company has earmarked an investment of Rs 2 crore to provide RIMS.
“We have signed a 5-year contract with Kaseya costing us close to Rs 75 lakh, and have set up a network operations center (NOC) at an investment of Rs 1.25 crore. The NOC will have an initial capacity to serve 25,000 end-devices, and scalability to serve 1,00,000. We have put together a team of 10 to manage our RIMS offerings,” revealed K V Jagannath, MD, Choice.
The key to Choice’s RIMS entry is its plan to offer the services through channels. “A lot of customers today depend on the reseller for their infrastructure services. Many of these resellers are small and can only provide onsite resources to support customer infrastructure,” Jagannath explained. “They cannot afford to build an NOC on their own. Such resellers are our potential partners. They can outsource the management to us and continue to provide onsite support to customers. In this way, smaller resellers can expand their services to include more customers without much investment.”
According to Jagannath, using RIMS, nearly 80 percent of infrastructure management issues can be resolved remotely with only 20 percent resolved onsite. Besides, “RIMS allows partners to consolidate their costs because the number of onsite calls and repeat calls reduces drastically, and with the same number of engineers partners can serve more customers, thus increasing their revenues.”
Choice has three offerings in the RIMS space: Standard, Gold and Platinum. Standard covers the default services that the majority of customers prefer to outsource, while Gold and Platinum would include additional premium services that only a few customers might want to choose.
“Our pricing is based on the number of end-devices that the customer wants us to manage remotely. As the volume goes up, the pricing will come down. Our pricing falls between Rs 2,500 and Rs 5,000 per device per year for PC client management depending on the type of service the customer wants. Pricing for servers starts from Rs 15,000 per device per year, and goes beyond depending on the type of server and number of CPUs,” informed Jagannath.
So far Choice has signed up 10 partners to provide RIMS, expects to take this number to 40 by the end of this year, and hopes to have at least 50,000 end-devices under RIMS by the end of the
current fiscal. “We expect to clock $3 million in revenues from this business over the next two years,” Jagannath stated.
Market researchers predict the global RIMS opportunity to be worth $55 billion by 2015, of which nearly $11 billion is likely to come from India. |