TCS looks to needs of SMBs

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which has traditionally only serviced larger enterprises globally, is now looking to avail its expertise to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) too.

Through its subscription-based IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) model, the global IT services and outsourcing company aims to provide SMBs with managed IT and telecom services as well as infrastructure offerings from TCS and its partners.

TCS' chief technology officer K. Ananth Krishnan, told ZDNet Asia during an interview, the company is piloting ITaaS in India "to serve the IT needs of a really small business".

"It's not going to be just a software application that will run on this platform, but also the end-to-end service, because in the small and micro business there's no IT department, there's no CIO," he said. With employees in these companies busy servicing customers and trying to win new clients, there would also hardly be any human resources to specify IT requirements, do analyses, and design, test or accept software from an external party, Krishnan noted.

"[Such organizations] are looking for out-of-the-box, quick and useful solutions that can be accessed on multiple devices," he pointed out. "They may not have the patience or the energy to even set up a wireless network inside their office."

The company is able to quickly provide ITaaS tools to SMBs through Instant Apps, a TCS technology that enables applications to be developed entirely within a Web browser, said Krishnan. "More importantly, the applications can be maintained by the end-users themselves with little effort," he said.

According to TCS, there is increased interest among SMBs for shared services, customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management, common office/administrative offerings, network-based computing and advanced applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management.

These would be primary drivers for SMBs to adopt services such as ITaaS, the company said.