The Forrester Wave™: Global Delivery Infrastructure Management, Q4 2005

IT service providers of all stripes are ramping up their low-cost, remote infrastructure delivery capabilities. Traditionally, domestic providers touted their global capabilities as a mechanism for serving clients locally wherever they happened to be. But now providers are moving toward a more distributed, process-centric, global delivery model (GDM) that relies on nearshore and offshore facilities to remotely service clients. To assess their progress in adopting a low-cost GDM for infrastructure management, we graded 14 vendors across 28 criteria. The result: HP, EDS, and CSC lead the pack, each performing elements of remote infrastructure management work from offshore and nearshore locations — though they don't market these capabilities as transparently as the Indian vendors, nor do they offshore those processes to the same extent. The Indian vendors offshore more processes but need to move beyond labor arbitrage to compete with the traditional incumbent providers for infrastructure work; they also need to build out more robust network and disaster recovery/business continuity plans and expand beyond the US and UK for global deals. Included in this report is an interactive vendor comparison tool that provides detailed evaluations and customizable rankings.