Infrastructure Management Services (IMS) is an emerging concept in a world where IT infrastructure has become increasingly complex and specialized, in order to support increasingly complex and demanding applications. As such, in order to optimize the IT infrastructure and make it more reliable, a specialized team is needed to plan, operate, and monitor the infrastructure. The infrastructure includes the network, databases, and component hardware (servers, routers, etc.). IMS is about enabling customers to identify opportunities for efficiency improvement, design the right solutions for their operating environments, and plan and implement a solution that delivers measurable performance improvements. Thus, IMS “provides stable environments for increasingly sophisticated and demanding applications”. It can be offered as an
Employees have been transformed into efficient and mobile workforces with the help of IT. The solutions that help them in all aspects of running an office are collectively termed as Infrastructure Management Solutions or Workplace Solutions.
Businesses today are tightly coupled with information systems that play a pivotal role in establishing their business infrastructure. Fairly of the computer infrastructure can be costly. Enterprises and service providers are under increasing pressure to improve service levels. Applications such as Content Management, Data Warehousing, and Enterprise Portals, place additional loading on their IT infrastructure. All this leads to additional complexity in the infrastructure, making infrastructure management a challenging and critical task. The technical skills to meet these challenges are under-supplied in the market.
Leading market analysts have estimated the size of the IMS industry as around US$ 111 billion (Forrester, 2004-2005) to US$ 160 billion (Nasscom, 2005), and about US$ 200 billion today.
Key IMS components