Here are just some of the client success stories that we can share with you. These case studies highlight the kind of work that we have done for customer in different business domains and technologies. Simply click on the customer technology to view the list of customer.
Surpluss.in an online marketplace that provides buyers the opportunity to get global brands at affordable prices. Starting operations over a decade ago, the New Delhi-based Surpluss.in has emerged one of the leading providers for unboxed, refurbished goods in India. The company received the prestigious ‘Specialty e-Retailer of the Year 2015” honour by The Indian eRetail Awards for its creative initiatives in the online retail space. It scored high for its site design, usability, customer experience, service, and need fulfilment among other aspects.
The Challenge
Given its conventional IT environment, the company followed a customary approach to procurement of goods that was impeding its development plans. It had no real-time visibility on inventory and lacked an effective process for stock management. This led to wastage and increase in cost. At the same time, it also meant underutilization of systems.
To resolve its challenges, Surpluss.in wanted an IT landscape that would provide the ability to scale in an uninhibited way. The company recognized that with its conservative architecture it wouldn’t be able to transform quickly. After considering all options available, it decided to migrate to AWS for greater flexibility, ease of use and cost containment aspects.
The Solution
With Umbrella Infocare as its implementation partner, Surpluss.in has gained the quickest and most professional way of getting up and running. With access to an array of technologies enabled through on-demand resources, Surpluss.in was able to get started with AWS technologies swiftly. The new system can handle unpredictable loads without the need for estimation or forecasting. This means, Surpluss.in no longer needs to predict future traffic or face delays while gaining time significantly to go to market.
Umreblla Infocare helped implement AWS features like S3 for storing images and static contents. It deployed CloudFront for content delivery and RDS for database management. Surpluss.in adopted CloudWatch for monitoring server health and performance that are very useful to a dynamic commerce site in accelerating performance, reducing development costs, and negotiating time to deal with a large number of suppliers.
The Benefits
Using AWS with the help of Umbrella Infocare has helped Surpluss.in focus its attention on development and product enhancement rather than managing its IT infrastructure. Working within a flexible system and using features like Elastic Load Balance and Autoscaling has allowed Surpluss.in to be able to optimise costs and achieve cost reduction, something that wouldn’t have been possible in a traditional IT environment.
With Umbrella Infocare help, Surpluss.in has got the right security levels and it has achieved 100 percent uptime. Furthermore, the company now runs their Web Application, Mobile Application, and all Business Applications on AWS cloud.
About Vestergaard
Vestergaard is one of the world’s leading firms devoted to improving the health of vulnerable people, most of who live in developing countries. The Switzerland headquartered firm with offices across the world, aims to build a healthier, and more sustainable planet. It focuses its effort by fighting malaria, HIV/AIDS, diarrhoea disease s, and neglected tropical ailments. The company is the largest producer of long-lasting insecticidal bed nets, PermaNet®.
The Challenge
The organization had been using AWS for a number of years for comprehensive production & disaster recovery management and it was greatly satisfied with its flexibility and cost benefits. With a hybrid infrastructure including on-site and off-site assets, the company wanted to have a single solution to run across all its systems provided by different vendors.
Vestergaard didn’t have to look too far for an implementation partner. Based on a prior engagement, the company decided to continue its relationship with Umbrella Infocare. It was fully satisfied with its proven skills and experience in cloud adoption strategies.
The Solution
After evaluating available cloud options in the market, Vestergaard with help from Umbrella Infocare selected AWS because of its wide range of services, flexibility, and speed in designing and provisioning. The solution also offered significant cost advantages that other service providers could not match.
Umbrella Infocare designed the back-up implementation strategy in line with the organization’s business requirements. The AWS Storage Gateway adopted by Vestergaard features an off-site backup alternative that has robust data security provisions as well as seamless integration with existing infrastructure and applications. With the new solution, Umbrella was able to eliminate a number of the intrinsic issues that were being caused by the hybrid infrastructure environment
The Benefits
Umbrella Infocare successfully implemented AWS Storage Gateway in line with best practice guidelines. The previous pain points of an inconsistent and unreliable backup had been eliminated.
In a short period of a week, Vestergaard could see the benefits from easy integration with existing applications and processes. This resulted in highly secure data encryption and asynchronous uploading of data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) platform.
The international firm is now able to effectively backup data in hours what previously took days. Expanding its use of AWS, Vestergaard has now moved some of their production workloads also on AWS.
About Blackberrys
Blackberrys is an Indian formal wear brand owned by Mohan Clothing Co. Pvt Ltd. Established in 1991, it mainly caters to men. The Blackberrys brand has an extensive network of franchise stores, company-owned showrooms and is available in more than 900 multi-brand outlets.
The Challenge
The company wanted to extend its presence to online and have an e-commerce website which is reliable, scalable and available at all times. The aim was to provide a good customer experience while shopping.
Initially the company had outsourced the development of the application and hosting it on AWS to a service provider. However the experience was not satisfactory. The website faced availability and performance issues which did not bode well for customer experience.
The Solution
Blackberrys then engaged Umbrella Infocare to manage its infrastructure on an ongoing basis. Soon after the Umbrella Infocare team came on board, it redeployed the website and optimized performance by introducing changes in the architecture. One of the things the team did was examine the infrastructure and close unauthorized ports which had made the application vulnerable to DDoS attacks. The team then used auto scaling to enable the website to scale up and down as traffic increased or decreased. The team also used Elastic Cache to store user sessions and enhance customer experience.
Umbrella also provides a monthly report of the infrastructure with suggestions for performance optimization and cost reduction.
The Benefits
Blackberrys´ e-commerce website has not faced any issues ever since Umbrella Infocare took over as its managed service provider. The website is always available and has very high speed of accessibility. “We have not faced downtime issues since we engaged Umbrella. The website performance has also gone up,” says Rajesh Verma, CIO of Mohan Clothing.
Umbrella has understood the business imperatives and aligned the infrastructure to meet with those objectives. The technical team does not have to spend time and resources in managing the performance of the website. “This allows me to focus on important business issues and not spend time in managing the IT infrastructure,” explains Verma.
Good Earth is India´s leading design house with both physical and online presence. It is an exclusive premium brand which celebrates the culture and history of a rich and diverse land with luxurious sustainable home items. With its unique mix of vibrant colour and serenity, Good Earth captures the essence of Indian style where opposites and contradictions coexist naturally and easily.
The Challenge
The Good Earth website crashed during a sale and it was a business imperative for the customer to have the site up and running in the next 24 hours. However, it appeared impossible to achieve that objective with the existing infrastructure service provider. Faced with the crisis, Dinesh Joshi the IT head at Good Earth reached out to Umbrella Infocare and asked for help. This confidence was the result of an earlier engagement. The need of the hour was to step in fast, and quickly get the website running during the sale period to salvage the Good Earth reputation.
The Solution
Within hours of the first call, the Umbrella team did an assessment and gave an assurance that the website would be up and running within hours. The customer´s infrastructure team then fast tracked the proposal internally and got the necessary approval for the new deployment.
The team did a requirement assessment and deployed EC2 and initially deployed SQL RDS. During the test however, RDS was not functioning efficiently so the team switched to EC2 with SQL and achieved the immediate objective of getting the site running. The deployment took just 8 hours, enabling the customer to get back into business.
After the sale, the Umbrella team took about a week to streamline operations and reset the infrastructure to handle regular traffic. The team then worked together to understand business requirements and tweaked the deployment for optimum performance.
The Umbrella team is now working with the client to expand the deployment to include cloud directory services, S3 which is a simple storage service and Glacier which is AWS´ archival services.
Being a design studio, creative assets are business critical for Good Earth and Umbrella team is now working on developing an effective digital asset management solution.
The Benefits
Umbrella is now the managed service provider and the client is highly satisfied with the website performance. There are proactive management measures which includes real-time performance monitoring, routine maintenance services such as server updates, patches, etc for optimized performance and automated escalation which allows the team to take pro-active measures.
Says Dinesh Joshi, Head of IT at Good Earth, «Umbrella exceeded our expectations as we could get the website running within hours of nightmarish experience. They have continued to delight us with expertise in AWS infrastructure and we are therefore steadily working to expand the relationship.»
Umbrella is also working with Good Earth to support its new initiative—another e-commerce site under the brand Nicobar.
The Client: CABI
Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI) is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people´s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.
CABI´s approach involves putting information, skills and tools into people’s hands. The organization´s 48 member countries guide and influence the work, delivered by scientific staff from its network of global centers.
The Challenge
CABI was looking for a robust, stable and scalable infrastructure to deploy its ICT application which delivers actionable information to farmers around the world. The application pushes relevant, actionable information to subscribers across continents about quality of soil, invasive species, and pests and diseases to help improve livelihoods and increase production.
CABI wanted a solution that was cost-effective and delivered the best value for money. While a cloud-based infrastructure was appealing, the customer was not sure of its benefits and was hesitant to take the plunge. This was in early 2014, when the buzz around cloud was loud but adoption was still nascent in India.
The Solution
Looking for a partner to provide both technical and consultative assistance, CABI reached out to Umbrella Infocare. After understanding the business requirements, Umbrella educated the client about AWS offerings, its pricing models, price and performance optimizing models and the fundamentals about designing a robust, scalable and reliable architecture.
This convinced CABI Umbrella was the right partner to embark on its cloud journey. Umbrella designed a robust architecture which is secure, scalable, flexible and reliable. CABI is happy with the deployment, and has not faced any challenges in migration and in application performance.
Umbrella designed an architecture using EC2 to run the application, S3 for storing static information and RDS for storing information about farmers and Cloud Front for distributing video and images.
The Benefits
CABI is happy with Umbrella´s role as a trusted advisor. “Umbrella not only educated us about cloud and its benefits to embark on the cloud journey, but continues to guide us on optimizing performance and achieving cost savings. We are highly satisfied with our relationship with Umbrella and the value they provide in terms of our cloud deployment strategy. The application is running well, fulfilling our business objective,” says Nitesh Mann, Head of IT, India.
Umbrella also advised CABI to run its test and dev environment on AWS. Since AWS allows to build and destroy infrastructure in seconds, maintaining an on premise infrastructure that is occasionally used to test applications during development did not make sense. Instead moving dev & test function to AWS enabled CABI to convert its capital expenditure to an operating expenditure—an expense which is incurred only when a test is executed.
Going forward, CABI is exploring to expand its AWS deployment and run more workloads.
The Client: PayNet Systems Pvt Ltd
Paynet Systems is a financial technology services company that provides innovative, end-to-end enterprise payment solutions to help enterprises increase revenue and boost user engagement. PayNet enables companies to easily offer a fully branded, secure mobile wallet solution that includes P2P transfer, remittances, top-up channels, virtual payment cards, loyalty points and rewards, promotions and offers, amongst other features.
The Challenge
The Paynet Cloud is a secure, highly configurable, rich platform that enables businesses to design digital payment solutions quickly, easily in a compliant manner. The platform allows Paynet’s customers to focus on designing and developing payment solutions to delight the customer, while taking advantage of a full-featured secure payment platform.
Paynet wanted to host its platform on a highly scalable, robust, flexible and secure infrastructure environment which is also cost-effective.
A key requirement was to design a highly secure architecture which is PCI DSS compliant. Since the platform was targeted at applications which facilitate financial transactions, a crucial business imperative was to provide the confidence about a secure platform.
After considerable due diligence, Paynet decided to host its application on Amazon Web Services and partner with Umbrella Infocare.
The Solution
Umbrella has designed a highly secure architecture using AWS VPC and deployed a number of server hardening practices to host Paynet Cloud. AWS advocates security is a shared responsibility—while AWS ensures compliance at the infrastructure level, customer has to ensure security and compliance at the application layer.
Umbrella used AWS IAM services and categorized users into security groups. VPC flow logs provides further visibility as it enables to capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC.
Paynet has a tiered architecture with application and database at different layers to deliver high performance, and to define role-based access.
Among other services Umbrella has used AWS ELB to distribute incoming traffic to multiple EC2s and auto scaling to ensure consistent high performance.
The Benefits
The Paynet Cloud has consistently delivered high performance to its customers, enabling it to offer SLAs for high availability and reliability. Paynet does not worry about investing upfront to buy additional resources or worry about idle capacity. The on-demand AWS Cloud allows Paynet to focus on expanding its business by continuously developing a robust platform, relevant features and upgrading security and compliance to make it more appealing to customers.
The technical support from Umbrella and AWS ensures Paynet does not have to spend time and energy resolving infrastructure issues.
The AWS infrastructure compliance with international security and privacy frameworks helps reassure Paynet’s customers about the stringent security practices of the hosting infrastructure.
Says Ankur Mishra, Chief Innovation Officer, Paynet, “The superb technical competence of Umbrella allows us to focus on designing technicalities specific to our business objectives, namely compliance and security. AWS infrastructure gives us scalability and reliability, which is critical to achieve our business objectives.”
About PI Industries
PI Industries is a market leader that specializes in the agri input and custom synthesis & manufacturing. The Gurgaon-based company operates three formulation and two manufacturing facilities in India, besides having five multi-product plants at its locations across Jammu and Gujarat. The company’s business is supported by a strong R&D set up that works to develop and commercialise products based on newly discovered chemistries with reputed MNC innovators.
The Challenge
For PI Industries, aligning its business growth with rising complexity of managing, provisioning, and delivering applications was becoming a major task. The company started experiencing the common issues of growing infrastructure sprawl that was linked to manageability and cost issues.
PI Industries sought to consolidate and virtualize all its IT assets including servers, desktops, and applications. The aim was to not only increase productivity, but also reduce end-user device cost by 50 percent. After assessing all available solutions, the company settled on Citrix technologies, mainly due to its ability to provide personalized user experience to virtualize its datacenter, desktops and applications.
The Solution
The company’s enduring association with Citrix since 2003, when it implemented an ERP system to publish applications played a significant role in its decision to go for XenDesktop and XenServer.
Based on virtualization skills and expertise, PI Industries selected Umbrella Infocare as its implementation partner to virtualize its desktops, datacenter, and applications. Taking a big bang implementation approach, Umbrella Infocare successfully completed the rollout of XenDesktop to 800 users across the enterprise that took less than a week.
The Benefits
Umbrella Infocare’s new solution now helps PI Industries to deliver most of its applications to its users over XenDesktop. The new environment allows effective collaboration and mobility, as employees are able to access their data from anywhere. Moreover, the new setup has also helped in lowering the end user device costs by 50%.
Overall, Citrix XenDesktop has improved operations efficiency and productivity while streamlining processes. This has led to significant time and cost savings through effective resource utilization.
Another advantage has been the application issues can now be resolved within minutes. By replacing the thin client instead of the earlier practice of diagnosing, resolving and re-building, the company has made the process more result-oriented.
About Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas
Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas is a full service Indian law firm, headquartered in Mumbai, India. The firm came into existence in May 2015 from its predecessor Amarchand & Mangaldas & Suresh A Shroff & Co. A national leader in the area of corporate and finance, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas ranks as one of the most prestigious law firms in India. The firm has more than 600 lawyers and 91 partners.
The Challenge
The client had deployed desktop virtualization but was challenged with performance issues which seriously hindered employee productivity. Everyday, helpdesk was flooded with more than 100 logs.
The client engaged Umbrella Infocare (UIC) to take over the management of its desktop virtualization. Earlier UIC had done a successful deployment of mobile virtualization for Cyril and this built sufficient confidence in UIC’s capabilities.
After UIC was engaged, performance issues were sorted, call logs reduced drastically and user satisfaction increased significantly.
The Solution
First, UIC spent time understanding the client’s business objectives. Being a legal firm, the client required lawyers to collaborate and share heavy files. This clogged the network and caused performance issues.
Then UIC conducted due diligence and found several issues: server imbalance, compatibility issues outdated features, bugs and security holes. The company rolled out an upgraded version of Citrix Xen, deployed patches and reconfigured servers aligned to network load. UIC also deployed an onsite engineer who handled most issues, rarely requiring escalation. In case of escalation UIC experts are swiftly called in, who then work collaboratively with onsite engineer to stabilize the environment and settle the log.
UIC instituted processes to regularly share data and review network performance with the client, thereby improving performance consistently and continuously.
These measures brought about drastic change and the result became evident in a short time. As escalations dipped, user satisfaction zoomed upward.
Says Parvesh Chahal, IT infrastructure Manager at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, “The Umbrella team understood our business requirement and began the technical assessment with the right perspective. The Umbrella team is clearly well versed with Citrix technology and were quickly able to identify technical issues. This combination has made Umbrella a winning choice.”
The Customer
A leader in Polyurethane (PU) Foam, Sheela Group is a multi-billion rupee entity. Established in 1971, Sheela Group has nationwide presence in manufacturing PU foam and markets its products globally. The Group is committed to a single vision—bringing comfort, convenience and luxury to enhance the lifestyle of modern man.
The winning brands of Sheela Group include
- SLEEPWELL – The flagship brand for mattresses and comfort accessories
- FEATHER FOAM – A Pure PU Foam
- LAMIFLEX – A superior quality POLYETHER/POLYESTER foam for lamination
The Challenge
Sheela Group wanted to realign the business strategy and engage more with retailers to boost revenues and to get a close feel of customers and thereby further embed its brands in the market. The company needed the infrastructure to support its new business goals. The need was to quickly extend the ERP to retailers across the country and provide access to a closed group of users. Getting the right partner to implement the technology was critical.
The Solution
Sheela Group turned to its trusted partner Momentum Infotech (now Umbrella Infotech) and asked for a solution. Says Pertisth Mankotia, CIO & CHRO of the Group, “Without hesitation we turned to Umbrella, a Gold Citrix partner. We shared a personal equation and we knew we could trust the company. We were confident Umbrella could understand our vision, our pain points and design a solution to meet with the business objectives.”
Umbrella advised application virtualization and the roll out began earnestly. Umbrella deployed Citrix Xenapp to extend ERP access to all retailers, applying load balancing and close monitoring to optimize delivery.
Within months retailers across regions were on-boarded onto the new system, enabling Sheela to connect directly with retailers.
Benefits
Sheela is now able to engage closely with retailers and harvest huge business benefits. The company has launched several schemes for retailers, boosting its revenues and is able to ramp up its reach to customers faster via new retailers.
Speaking about the experience, Pertisth Mankotia, CIO & CHRO of Sheela Group says, “This was a strategic vision for the Group and we had to get the roll out right, in a time bound manner, very quickly. We were confident Umbrella is the right partner as the company has the right value system.”
Sheela Group is happy with the performance of the deployment and not experienced any downtime since the roll out two years ago. Umbrella has designed a close monitoring system which send alerts and allows pro-active management, “We are happy with Umbrella as it has integrity and is transparent in its dealings and this is evident in its pro-active approach to maintenance,” says Mankotia.
RateGain is a technology company that specializes in the hospitality and travel sector. Offering a range of SaaS applications, RateGain helps companies to make more revenue.
Founded in 2004, RateGain has 12,000 clients around the globe including hotels, online travel agents, airlines, car rental companies, cruise liners as well as tour operators and wholesalers. RateGain’s cloud-based software helps organizations with rate intelligence, price optimization, seamless electronic distribution and brand engagement.
The Challenge
RateGain works with developers and partners from different locations to optimize its application continuously and make it more relevant to customers. The company wanted to provide remote access to its servers in India and the US, but did not want to open up all applications. Since the company provides business critical applications to customers, it wanted to open up access to specific applications where they wanted to get work done. Further, RateGain also wanted to regulate the access in a secure environment.
The Solution
RateGain approached Umbrella Infocare as it is one of the premium Citrix partners. After due diligence, Umbrella rolled out Citrix XenApp across locations in India and the US and was able to control access to developers and partners in India, the Philippines and the US.
One of the most important business objectives was to restrict users and control the actions users can perform. Using XenApp features, Umbrella enabled RateGain to restrict user entry and only allows authorized users to work in a highly secure environment. Umbrella also enabled RateGain to prevent developers to perform actions which may compromise application security.
RateGain has achieved its business objectives of allowing remote access to developers in a secure environment. The company is happy with the way Umbrella has managed the application virtualization roll out. Says Sanjay Raina, AVP IT at RateGain, “The Citrix virtualization roll out has been successful and we are very happy with the technology expertise of Umbrella, the service monitoring and support it provides us.”
Here are just some of the client success stories that we can share with you. These case studies highlight the kind of work that we have done for customer in different business domains and technologies. Simply click on the customer technology to view the list of customer.
Surpluss.in an online marketplace that provides buyers the opportunity to get global brands at affordable prices. Starting operations over a decade ago, the New Delhi-based Surpluss.in has emerged one of the leading providers for unboxed, refurbished goods in India. The company received the prestigious ‘Specialty e-Retailer of the Year 2015” honour by The Indian eRetail Awards for its creative initiatives in the online retail space. It scored high for its site design, usability, customer experience, service, and need fulfilment among other aspects.
The Challenge
Given its conventional IT environment, the company followed a customary approach to procurement of goods that was impeding its development plans. It had no real-time visibility on inventory and lacked an effective process for stock management. This led to wastage and increase in cost. At the same time, it also meant underutilization of systems.
To resolve its challenges, Surpluss.in wanted an IT landscape that would provide the ability to scale in an uninhibited way. The company recognized that with its conservative architecture it wouldn’t be able to transform quickly. After considering all options available, it decided to migrate to AWS for greater flexibility, ease of use and cost containment aspects.
The Solution
With Umbrella Infocare as its implementation partner, Surpluss.in has gained the quickest and most professional way of getting up and running. With access to an array of technologies enabled through on-demand resources, Surpluss.in was able to get started with AWS technologies swiftly. The new system can handle unpredictable loads without the need for estimation or forecasting. This means, Surpluss.in no longer needs to predict future traffic or face delays while gaining time significantly to go to market.
Umreblla Infocare helped implement AWS features like S3 for storing images and static contents. It deployed CloudFront for content delivery and RDS for database management. Surpluss.in adopted CloudWatch for monitoring server health and performance that are very useful to a dynamic commerce site in accelerating performance, reducing development costs, and negotiating time to deal with a large number of suppliers.
The Benefits
Using AWS with the help of Umbrella Infocare has helped Surpluss.in focus its attention on development and product enhancement rather than managing its IT infrastructure. Working within a flexible system and using features like Elastic Load Balance and Autoscaling has allowed Surpluss.in to be able to optimise costs and achieve cost reduction, something that wouldn’t have been possible in a traditional IT environment.
With Umbrella Infocare help, Surpluss.in has got the right security levels and it has achieved 100 percent uptime. Furthermore, the company now runs their Web Application, Mobile Application, and all Business Applications on AWS cloud.
About Vestergaard
Vestergaard is one of the world’s leading firms devoted to improving the health of vulnerable people, most of who live in developing countries. The Switzerland headquartered firm with offices across the world, aims to build a healthier, and more sustainable planet. It focuses its effort by fighting malaria, HIV/AIDS, diarrhoea disease s, and neglected tropical ailments. The company is the largest producer of long-lasting insecticidal bed nets, PermaNet®.
The Challenge
The organization had been using AWS for a number of years for comprehensive production & disaster recovery management and it was greatly satisfied with its flexibility and cost benefits. With a hybrid infrastructure including on-site and off-site assets, the company wanted to have a single solution to run across all its systems provided by different vendors.
Vestergaard didn’t have to look too far for an implementation partner. Based on a prior engagement, the company decided to continue its relationship with Umbrella Infocare. It was fully satisfied with its proven skills and experience in cloud adoption strategies.
The Solution
After evaluating available cloud options in the market, Vestergaard with help from Umbrella Infocare selected AWS because of its wide range of services, flexibility, and speed in designing and provisioning. The solution also offered significant cost advantages that other service providers could not match.
Umbrella Infocare designed the back-up implementation strategy in line with the organization’s business requirements. The AWS Storage Gateway adopted by Vestergaard features an off-site backup alternative that has robust data security provisions as well as seamless integration with existing infrastructure and applications. With the new solution, Umbrella was able to eliminate a number of the intrinsic issues that were being caused by the hybrid infrastructure environment
The Benefits
Umbrella Infocare successfully implemented AWS Storage Gateway in line with best practice guidelines. The previous pain points of an inconsistent and unreliable backup had been eliminated.
In a short period of a week, Vestergaard could see the benefits from easy integration with existing applications and processes. This resulted in highly secure data encryption and asynchronous uploading of data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) platform.
The international firm is now able to effectively backup data in hours what previously took days. Expanding its use of AWS, Vestergaard has now moved some of their production workloads also on AWS.
About Blackberrys
Blackberrys is an Indian formal wear brand owned by Mohan Clothing Co. Pvt Ltd. Established in 1991, it mainly caters to men. The Blackberrys brand has an extensive network of franchise stores, company-owned showrooms and is available in more than 900 multi-brand outlets.
The Challenge
The company wanted to extend its presence to online and have an e-commerce website which is reliable, scalable and available at all times. The aim was to provide a good customer experience while shopping.
Initially the company had outsourced the development of the application and hosting it on AWS to a service provider. However the experience was not satisfactory. The website faced availability and performance issues which did not bode well for customer experience.
The Solution
Blackberrys then engaged Umbrella Infocare to manage its infrastructure on an ongoing basis. Soon after the Umbrella Infocare team came on board, it redeployed the website and optimized performance by introducing changes in the architecture. One of the things the team did was examine the infrastructure and close unauthorized ports which had made the application vulnerable to DDoS attacks. The team then used auto scaling to enable the website to scale up and down as traffic increased or decreased. The team also used Elastic Cache to store user sessions and enhance customer experience.
Umbrella also provides a monthly report of the infrastructure with suggestions for performance optimization and cost reduction.
The Benefits
Blackberrys´ e-commerce website has not faced any issues ever since Umbrella Infocare took over as its managed service provider. The website is always available and has very high speed of accessibility. “We have not faced downtime issues since we engaged Umbrella. The website performance has also gone up,” says Rajesh Verma, CIO of Mohan Clothing.
Umbrella has understood the business imperatives and aligned the infrastructure to meet with those objectives. The technical team does not have to spend time and resources in managing the performance of the website. “This allows me to focus on important business issues and not spend time in managing the IT infrastructure,” explains Verma.
About PI Industries
PI Industries is a market leader that specializes in the agri input and custom synthesis & manufacturing. The Gurgaon-based company operates three formulation and two manufacturing facilities in India, besides having five multi-product plants at its locations across Jammu and Gujarat. The company’s business is supported by a strong R&D set up that works to develop and commercialise products based on newly discovered chemistries with reputed MNC innovators.
The Challenge
For PI Industries, aligning its business growth with rising complexity of managing, provisioning, and delivering applications was becoming a major task. The company started experiencing the common issues of growing infrastructure sprawl that was linked to manageability and cost issues.
PI Industries sought to consolidate and virtualize all its IT assets including servers, desktops, and applications. The aim was to not only increase productivity, but also reduce end-user device cost by 50 percent. After assessing all available solutions, the company settled on Citrix technologies, mainly due to its ability to provide personalized user experience to virtualize its datacenter, desktops and applications.
The Solution
The company’s enduring association with Citrix since 2003, when it implemented an ERP system to publish applications played a significant role in its decision to go for XenDesktop and XenServer.
Based on virtualization skills and expertise, PI Industries selected Umbrella Infocare as its implementation partner to virtualize its desktops, datacenter, and applications. Taking a big bang implementation approach, Umbrella Infocare successfully completed the rollout of XenDesktop to 800 users across the enterprise that took less than a week.
The Benefits
Umbrella Infocare’s new solution now helps PI Industries to deliver most of its applications to its users over XenDesktop. The new environment allows effective collaboration and mobility, as employees are able to access their data from anywhere. Moreover, the new setup has also helped in lowering the end user device costs by 50%.
Overall, Citrix XenDesktop has improved operations efficiency and productivity while streamlining processes. This has led to significant time and cost savings through effective resource utilization.
Another advantage has been the application issues can now be resolved within minutes. By replacing the thin client instead of the earlier practice of diagnosing, resolving and re-building, the company has made the process more result-oriented.