Former Infoscians float new venture

Bangalore, Mar 7: Six former Infoscians, who were considered the key architects of Finacle, Infosys' popular banking software, have come together to start a venture in IT infrastructure management.

Rangarajan P, who was head of Asia-Pacific sales for Finacle, Sivakumar R, formerly senior member of the Finacle architecture team, and four others have set up Vitage Technologies that will focus on developing applications for remote/on-site infrastructure management. Till now, much of the focus in this area has been on hardware.

"Banking and retail are two verticals that rely heavily on applications. Today, applications constitute nearly 40% of any remote/onsite IT infrastructure-outsourcing contract," says Rangarajan, now CEO of Vitage.

The team heading this venture has chipped in close to million over the past nine months. They have also aligned with the services arm of the over Rs 100-crore Vitage Group to leverage its existing customer base and brand equity as a systems integrator. Of the 450 people who work for the group, 340 are on the rolls of the new applications management business.

"The first full-fledged version of our product will roll out within the next four months," says Alton Viegas, co-founder and director of the Vitage Group, which is targeting to touch 0 million in group revenues over the next five years.

The potential in IT infrastructure management is seen to be big. As per Gartner estimates, 50 pc of the labour doing onsite infrastructure management is expected to move offshore by 2012. RIMS (remote infrastructure management services), according to Forrester Research, was worth around billion in 2005 and is expected to grow at the rate of 100% per annum over the next five years.

IBM, which also provides IT infrastructure management services, found in a recent study of CEOs that companies, which outsourced this infrastructure, realised significant long-term improvements in business performance compared to their sector peers.

Sources