Birlasoft Australia is an outsourcing provider with offices in Melbourne and Sydney and is a division of the CK Birla Group, one of India's largest commercial and industrial houses, with strategic equity participation by GE Capital.

Speaking at Gartner's 2006 Outsourcing and IT Services Summit in Sydney last month, Kershaw said outsourcing providers are still targeting the big end of town, particularly government.

"SMBs frequently manage volatile situations and if they are a subsidiary of a large international company, which is often the case, there is a standard suite of applications they must maintain; and it is very difficult," he said. Smaller organizations need application support.

"The application mix of large companies, including Oracle and SAP, must be supported. [The mix] is not as complex for SMBs, but its maintenance is still necessary," he said.

"SMBs also have specialist application challenges - many have bespoke applications and their IT managers are faced with the problem of finding staff to manage an application [not tied to a career path]."