: 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.
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Having consolidated the infrastructure, Selvam's next big challenge was to build a catalogue of services such that IT could now be handed out as a self-service portal. Selvam identified users and divided them into three categories. The first category of users would get access to the basic common portfolio of services standard for every employee of the group. This would include e-mail, MS Office and HR applications with in in-built workforce.
The second category of users would get access to the second tier of applications such as SAP and Blackberry services depending on the number of licenses.
The third and final category of applications would be specific to the function and core business of the company. Some of these applications may be even hosted outside on a public cloud.
Challenges: One of the biggest challenges enterprises face while going for consolidate private cloud infrastructure is migrating existing Software licenses. "Each vertical was significantly invested in IT licenses. We were able to mitigate the loss, by going with a single vendor," explains Selvam.
In this case, Siva chose to go with Microsoft with whom all the group companies had individual involvement. By sticking to the same vendor, the company was able to negotiated price and upgrade existing investments.
The other challenge was from the user community. Each vertical was governed by a different IT policy and change management was proving to be a huge challenge. To enlist better support from the user community, Selvam encouraged users to come and become a part of the corporate IT team and become the harbingers of change. "By including them in the process of change we were able to win their support and approval," explains Selvam.
One of the most mature steps taken by Siva group is the introduction of the chargeback mechanism. Every IT resources provided today can be measured, comes with a price tag and is billed to the department that accesses those services. It runs on a price-transfer mechanism. "This is truly pay-per-use. The top management can clearly see where and how IT is being utilized and measure its business benefits in clear ROI term," he explains.
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Today, Siva group's private cloud services more than 1200 users in both India and international destinations like Singapore, Dubai and the Europe. It supports multiple service providers and offers a five-nine connectivity. It also provides a detailed dashboard that measures and analyzes the IT usage across the business units, allowing management a clear view of how IT resources are being utilized and managed.
One of the biggest benefits was that the bandwidth utilization has shot up. Earlier each vertical operated in silos leaving chunks of IT recourses residing in islands. By consolidating, the group could provide more elasticity while planning for a 20 percent buffer capacity.
This advantage was recently illustrated when Siva group decided to pull back their telecom business, S Tel following the canceling of their 2G licenses. "Now we have free capacity and because of a centralized model we can provision it intelligently," he says.
For a rapidly expanding company like Siva, rapid provisioning for new business and scalability was one of the biggest concerns. The new private cloud's plug and play model allows the company to quickly modify existing portfolio of services, memory and storage bandwidth and adjust it the new users.
The Siva group's private cloud went live in March 2011 and has been functioning smoothly for a year now. The company hopes to recover the ROI in another three months.