Within 18 months of the transitioning of the work, HCL had re-engineered AMD's IT processes such that the company achieved the BS15000 certification — the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certification for organization processes. This was achieved over and above the required costs savings.

“We re-engineered the tooling framework, and in 18 months we achieved the BS15000 certification for AMD,” says a proud Maninder Singh. “AMD's was the first offshoring infrastructure-management center of any customer to get this certification.”

Satisfied with the support that they got for North America , AMD signed on HCL for supporting their global operations. HCL is today AMD's single point for Service Level Agreement (SLA) contact.

Customers are extending infrastructure deals to offshore providers mostly because they have been satisfied with them on the application side. Pearl Group, a leader in U.K. 's life and insurance market, for instance, recently extended its existing applications relationship with TCS. It has engaged TCS in an approximately $972 million integrated infrastructure-application-BPO deal, and hopes to benefit from the provider consolidating processes across the three services.

As customers benefit from these services, the market share of offshore providers will only increase. In 2005 the offshore players had only a miniscule three of the market; but their 61% growth rate (CAGR) stands to take their share up to 20% by 2010, according to the Everest research Institute. Meanwhile, the traditional infrastructure management players are growing at a comparatively paltry seven percent CAGR.

“Of course, they [traditional players] are big in revenue,” says Priti Rao, VP, Infrastructure Management Services, Infosys Technologies. “Our advantage comes from being able to processize everything. We look at tasks as a series of activities and then divide them between onshore and offshore.”