Effective management of infrastructure

With the help of Microland’s remote infrastructure services, Lodha Group has been able to improve service availability and operational productivity, writes Nivedan Prakash

Lodha Group, established in 1980, is a premier real estate developer headquartered in Mumbai. The company is currently developing in excess of 27 million sq. ft. of prime real estate over 30 projects in and around Mumbai, from Nepean Sea Road to Dombivali, making it one of the largest developers in Mumbai as well as in the country.

The company is now expanding into western and southern India and has recently kicked off their geographic expansion by launching Lodha Bellezza, an unparalleled super luxury residential project in Hyderabad and is soon expected to launch its first project in Pune as well.

Areas of concern

As a company, Lodha Group faced lack of IT service management processes, including ITIL framework and lack of proactive monitoring.

Due to lack of IT service management processes, what the company faced as a challenge was that—be it change management or incident management—there was no thorough process in place. Though the company had tools but there was no judicious utilization of those tools in place. And as a result, the company was getting lot of escalations due to absence of escalation management system.

Rajiv Ranjan, DGM–IT, Lodha Group of Companies, highlighted, “IT has become backbone for the entire industry sector today and we are no exception in it. The demands of the users are increasing to ensure information and communication channels are available round the clock to improve business. Hence, ensuring high availability of the systems had become a core business priority in our organization.”

Moreover, high availability of the information systems is a core factor that triggered the company to move into remote infrastructure management. Prior to moving into remote infrastructure management services, the company was having skeletal team looking after the IT systems during business hours.

However, scaling from IT perspective was a primary challenge since the company did not want to over invest in managing the infrastructure. Hence, Lodha Group has partnered with Microland, whom they think, are best in rendering IT services for their organization.

Microland was chosen over any other vendor because of its technical capabilities, its customer focus ability and commitment from senior management, proven ability on process, operational efficiency and automation capabilities, and lastly, providing cost reduction while managing round the clock.

Ranjan further added, “Yes, we evaluated multiple vendors for this exercise. However, Microland’s response to our need and initiating the program was the fastest. They also demonstrated a long-term partnership model and committed multiple value adds during this journey. Microland is also an industry leader in remote management and that gave us the confidence to work with them.”

Microland’s solution

Microland provided a wide array of remote infrastructure services to Lodha Group. The services included server management services (Windows/Unix), email management services, network and security services, backup and anti-virus services, and storage services.

With the help of Microland’s solution, the complete setup of Lodha Group is remotely managed and is proactively monitored with the help of tools. The company has divided the system into two parts—one is the end-user support and the other one is enterprise-level support, wherein there are anti-virus, Firewall, proxy servers, Exchange mail servers, AIX servers, etc. End-user support is handled by another vendor but they work hand-in-glove with Microland as well. So, Microland does the entire monitoring of the company’s system—be it patch management, release management, change management—all these aspects are taken care by Microland.

Any incident is automatically logged in the ticketing system and same is tracked till the closure. Said, Ranjan, “Alternatively, any change request is approved by us over either email or using work flow applications designed by Microland.”

Meanwhile, the remote infrastructure management started in April 2009, and during the project, transition of the program was handled very easily by Microland and that too in a very short span. Microland moved its transition team at a very short notice. However, some of the challenges that Lodha Group faced during the project was the transitioning from existing vendor to Microland, knowledge transfer to Microland, and also shadow operation between existing vendor and Microland.

Reaping the benefits

After going in for remote infrastructure management services from Microland, Lodha Group primarily witnessed improved SL’s on Incident Management. Since ITIL framework and proactive monitoring were not in place, and in the event of any incident, the company had to do a lot of R&D. And rather than moving into process-oriented mode, the team was moving into fire-fighting mode. So with this deployment, the company can very well monitor the incident, its timeline and the escalation levels as well.

Besides, a comprehensive IT risk assessment was carried during the transition phase and mitigation plans were put in place to improve system/network availability. And it has helped the company immensely. Also, proactive monitoring improved the system availability.

“The primary benefits for going with Microland solution was low cost of operation, 24x7 monitoring and management services, scalability and flexibility, and qualified resources availability to manage our IT infrastructure,” pointed out Ranjan.

Ranjan asserted, “Problem management initiatives to identify repeated issues and permanent fixes improved—75% reduction of P1 (levels of severity) calls in last quarter (comparison between May’09 to Sep’09) with only 1 P2 call in last six months (only Microland dependent calls).”

Additionally, the email service improved from 85% to 99% (on day one the company fixed its persistent email issue which was causing a downtime for 50% of its users using Web-based email module). This was one of the biggest issues that Lodha Group had to face before transition. There were 10 P1’s being logged/month for which the previous vendor couldn’t find a permanent solution.

Commenting further, Ranjan stated, “From the time Microland started managing the company’s infrastructure, we have seen significant improvement in our email services. Full credit goes to Microland’s mature remote management capability that has improved service availability and operational productivity.”

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com