The remote infrastructure management outsourcing market is likely to exceed $8 billion over five years, according to a report released by the Everest Research Institute.

In RIMO, the IT assets of a client are maintained and operated outside the physical premises of the company through offshore, in-shore or a global delivery centre model.

The infrastructure management outsourcing market is divided into two models -- infrastructure managed services and RIMO.

IMS refers to monitoring and managing including maintenance, administration and troubleshooting of IT infrastructure. RIMO, though dominated by traditional players such as IBM,

Accenture and Hewitt, is highly skewed towards Indian players.

Ross Tisnovsky, vice-president, ITO Research group, said, "RIMO is something that Indian players such as TCS, HCL, and Satyam have introduced in the global market. This market is growing at a faster rate with larger share of the growth coming from buyers renewing their contracts and with significant scope to increase."

The focus of the study will be on increasing the share of  Indian players in the IMO market.

The IMO, which was around $26 billion in 2005, is pegged to grow to $44 billion by 2010 and the offshore suppliers' share is expected to rise to 20 per cent from 3 per cent.

While majority of IMO revenues are still with traditional suppliers, offshore IMO pure-play suppliers are gaining ground through aggressive use of labour arbitrage.

For instance, in 2004, India's share in the IMO market was $460 million, which increased to $720 million in 2005.

The report also said the offshore model would grow at 61 per cent CAGR by 2010, while the traditional suppliers would grow by just 7 per cent.

However, Indian players will find it a bit more challenging to grab market share when compared to the BPO industry as most of the traditional players are already present in this space.

Going forward, Indian companies will have to rethink their strategy when it comes to RIMO and increase investment in assets.

Currently, Indian companies are not investing enough in buying the IT assets of the users. They only maintain the user's assets.

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