Infosys, a big outsourcing company based in India, got a nice win on Tuesday, grabbing a three-year contract to handle all the technology services and support for Microsoft itself.
The announcement prompts two lines of thought.
First, can’t Microsoft get its own technology to work by itself?
Second, the contract may say something about Microsoft’s plans for technology services. As Microsoft increasingly becomes an enterprise business, catering to corporate customers, there has been a lot of industry commentary and speculation that it might well make a big push into services — perhaps even buying a big technology services company like Accenture or one of the India outsourcers like, say, Infosys.
The Infosys pact, it seems, points to one of two paths for Microsoft: it doesn’t plan to make a big move in services, or Microsoft is giving Infosys an audition.
If Microsoft were serious about being a big player in services, it would presumably tend its own garden. I.B.M. does and so does Hewlett-Packard, which just acquired the big services supplier EDS.
With the Infosys deal, Microsoft is not passing tech-support headaches to an outsider that it had been handling on its own. Until now, Microsoft used several technology helpers. “This is simply the consolidation of work that used to be provided by multiple vendors to a single provider, Infosys,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The Microsoft-Infosys partnership is also an implicit reminder of one of technology’s truisms. Making software and making it work tend to be very different endeavors. Microsoft, apparently, is going to stay in its end of the pool.
“Microsoft is a pioneer in innovation, ” said Anand Nataraj, head of the infrastructure management services business at Infosys.
Microsoft’s talent, he added, lies in “making the latest products. They are good at what they do.”