: The US$3 billion Siva Group is a diverse conglomerate with business interests in a wide range of verticals such as oil palm, commodities trading (agro and minerals), shipping and logistics, wind energy, realty and hospitality, telecom, project engineering, and education and software business. From a business that started its journey selling Siva PCs, the group has grown into a successful IT business. It's no surprise that the company today runs what is credited to be one of the most mature private cloud-computing infrastructures in the country.

: Siva group's private cloud was born out of the business's need for flexibility. Until 2010, each of the company's six verticals operated as a separate business unit, with individual server rooms and data sets. The lack of standardization complicated and drove up costs for every IT management function. They were looking for a solution and they had to look no further than Dr. Selvam K, CIO, Siva group.

Dr. Selvam joined the Siva group as the CIO of their telecom wing S Tel. Selvam helped S Tel rollout services in record time, through low customization and a tightly integrated IT delivery system. Seeing his success record, the management of Siva invited Selvam to join as the group CIO and replicate the success across the company.

: As the new CIO, Dr. Selvam first priority was to do a business case to prove the benefits of having a common IT platform with standardized processes across the group. He ran a pilot that standardized the financial systems, the intranet messaging and SharePoint across all the business units. "The potential savings that the pilot revealed and unified synergy it brought in were the two things that triggered management interest, "explains Selvam.

With the management buy-in under his belt, Selvam began on his mission of creating what has become one of the largest private cloud set-ups in an Indian enterprise -- consolidating and standardizing all their IT infrastructure in one place.