Transformation Heroes (Edition II) by DynamicCIO

TRANSFORMATION HEROES EDITION II

These twelve business case studies serve as an example for companies standing at the cusp of growth and expansion, deliberating on which direction to move in. They stand testimony to the fact that future growth stories will be built around new technologies led organizational transformation.

Showcasing New Technology-Led Productivity Impact Stories

Co-founder/Editor: Rahul Neel Mani Executive Editor: Shipra Malhotra Art & Design: Shyni G & Nisha Anil Printed by: Thomson Press India Ltd; B-315, Okhla Industrial Area Phase 1, New Delhi-110020

GREY HEAD MEDIA PRIVATE LIMITED 1509 & 1510, 15th Floor, Devika Tower, Nehru Place, New Delhi-110019 www.greyhead.in Copyright 2016 Grey Head Media Private Limited. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without written permission is prohbited.

Transformation Heroes

Preface

Driving Organizational Change Through Technology SHIPRA MALHOTRA Executive Editor

he recipe for business success is the willingness to change. Some of the most successful organizations are those that have undergone transformation in line with the evolving market dynamics.

These transformation journeys, especially digital transformation, are built around new age technologies like cloud and mobility, bringing IT to the center stage. As a result, CIOs today are driving some of the most noteworthy transformations within their organizations – whether in terms of enhancing employee productivity, enabling better collaboration or bringing in agility. In continuation of the exercise we started last year, we studied some of India’s most vibrant organizations across verticals to identify IT leaders, heroes in their own small ways, making lasting impressions on their organizations’ future growth roadmap. The exercise culminated in putting together the second edition of this special compendium Transformation Heroes - a compilation of 12 inspiring business case studies. All of these exemplify and celebrate CIOs instrumental, in their own unique way, in transforming their respective organizations to efficient and productive workplaces, ready for their digital journey.

Vinay Nair

Monish Darda

Munender Soperna

Mohan Vizhakat

Apurva Mankad

Sumit Puri

Associate Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Commercial Excellence Cirrius Technologies Pg. 06

CIO, Dr. Lal PathLabs Pg. 08

Founder and CEO ECFY Consulting Pg. 10

CTO, Icertis Pg. 12

CTO, Manappuram Finance Ltd. Pg. 14

CIO, Max Healthcare Pg. 16

Kumar KV

Anuraag Chatterjee

Dr. Jagan Vaman

Mitul Shah

Sunil Nair

Piyush Kapadia

VP and Head – IT, Narayana Health Pg. 18

EVP & Corporate Development Officer – Strategy and New Business Initiatives, Paladion Networks Pg. 20

AVP-IT, Phoenix Mills Ltd. Pg. 22

Associate Director – IT, RAGE Frameworks Pg. 24

Senior Manager – IT, SKP Business Consulting Pg. 26

CFO & CIO, TechNova Imaging Pg. 28

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

CIRRIUS TECHNOLOGIES

Cirrius Deploys Azure to Achieve Scalability and Cut Down on Dependencies

irrius Technologies enables pharma and life sciences companies transform their medical engagements to the multichannel and digital way. Using its flagship digital pharma CRM platform, Phyzii, it enables its customers to engage, service and transact with the entire network consisting of their own reps, physicians, patients and the supply chain, with digital tools and rich digital content. The 100-employees-strong company claims that of the top 40 pharma companies in the country around 30 are on its platform.

VINAY NAIR Associate Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Commercial Excellence, Cirrius Technologies

Vinay Nair, Associate Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Commercial Excellence, Cirrius Technologies throws light on the scalability and agility that implementing Azure has offered.

Transformation Heroes

What were the key challenges before the company for which you considered deploying cloud? The primary reason we decided to adopt cloud was scalability. Cirrius had an existing legacy infrastructure that could not scale on demand. For example, we have clients that wanted to start with 500 users and quickly expand to host another 500 users with us. In such a scenario, it was important that we have a set up that could scale up with just a click.

hat led you to choose Microsoft W Azure for your cloud requirements? Since our client base comprised large enterprises, we wanted to align with a large hosting services provider. After much research of the existing service providers, we shortlisted two companies - Amazon and Microsoft. We were closely associated with Microsoft at that time and found the capabilities and functionalities of Azure quite attractive. This tilted the balance in its favour. Currently, around 60% of our operations are on Azure.

Any specific challenges you faced during the implementation process? One of the biggest challenges that we encountered during the implementation process was getting the configuration of Microsoft Azure with our set up right. Microsoft’s support and handholding went a long way in overcoming this bottleneck. Although we did engage with

Cirrius Technologies

“One of the reasons for running applications on Azure is the scalability it offers. We can add or remove resources as and when required.” —VINAY NAIR a partner, it didn’t turn out well. Hence, we decided to implement it ourselves and did it successfully. We also engaged more directly with Microsoft and were eventually able to crack the code. The entire roll out took about 4-5 months.

Post deployment, what tangible and intangible benefits have you accrued? Since migrating to Azure, we have cut down on a lot of dependencies. We don’t have to look at the hardware, operating systems, etc. One of the reasons for running applications on Azure is the scalability it offers. We can add resources to or remove resources from our application as and when they are required. Azure applications typically comprise multiple elements such as web and worker roles, storage, queues, virtual networks and caches. One of the advantages of dividing the application into multiple elements is that we can then scale each element individually. We might be able to meet a change in our tenants’ processing requirements by doubling the number of worker role instances without

increasing the number of message queues, or the size of our cache. Implementing Azure, we get the power of cloud services and yet maintain control of our data center. This lends us true hybrid cloud agility.

What are your future plans with respect to Azure and other Microsoft solutions? We eventually want to leverage Azure both in terms of usability and cost effectiveness. The cost reduction will take place when we make our system more Azure centric. The next step is to see how Microsoft’s India data center works. It will make a lot of difference if it offers all the facilities. From our end, there is some re-structuring to be done at the application and infrastructure level. We are looking for creating disaster recovery to ensure that our entire set up works even during the worst of times.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

DR. LAL PATHLABS

Microsoft Azure Helps Dr. Lal PathLabs Reduce Turn Around Time Per Sample by 15%

Dr.

Lal PathLabs provides quality diagnostic healthcare services in India through its network of over 5500+ collection centers and pick up points. Dr. Lal PathLabs has 172 labs and offers over 3500+ diagnostic and related healthcare tests and services.

MUNENDER SOPERNA Chief Information Officer Dr. Lal PathLabs

Munender Soperna, CIO, Dr. Lal PathLabs throws light on how aligning with Microsoft Azure helped the company take business to the next level.

Transformation Heroes

How is Dr. Lal PathLabs’ business structured? Dr. Lal PathLabs has two revenue streams – the network business or the franchisee model and the walk-in business. The former comprises around 5500+ Collection Centers (CCs) and Pick up Points (PUPs) and contributes to almost 65-70% of the business, while the latter consists of 172 labs and contributes to the remaining 30-35% of the business.

What bottlenecks were you encountering in the company’s growth? And, how were these tackled? Our business was growing more than 20% Year-on-Year, with the patient load doubling every third to fourth year. In fact, the patient load went up from 3,000 in 2007 to 50,000 currently. Of this, almost 35,000 patients every day are coming from the network business. This whopping growth in customer numbers meant requiring more manpower and resources to handle and register them. The CCs used to fill up a manual form/patient details and send it to the nearest lab location for registration in the ERP system of Dr. Lal PathLabs. With the ever-increasing volumes, this process was having difficulties to meet the Turn Around Time. The answer to this challenge was clear – we needed to scale and we needed to do that fast. And, this would be possible only with cloud. We realized that it was the most optimum time for the company

Dr. Lal PathLabs

“There has been substantial saving of time in per patient report uploading. Today, we can send reports back to the patients with savings of 1.5 hours.” —MUNENDER SOPERNA to start the cloud journey if we needed to cope up with the growing volumes in a professionally managed solution in order to avoid facing tough times ahead.

Why did you choose Microsoft Azure for your cloud journey? We did a comprehensive study on various parameters - price, availability, services, competition, etc. – finally boiling down to choosing between Azure and one or two other big cloud players. As we were 100% Microsoft shop, Azure got an edge in the race for selection because of the aspects of uniformity and seamlessness in integration with other existing set pieces of technology in Dr. Lal PathLabs. PC Solutions, Microsoft’s partner, helped us in our cloud implementation journey.

Which applications have you moved to Microsoft Azure? During the analysis phase we closely monitored each and every activity that was being performed at the CCs and narrowed down to two processes to be moved on to the cloud – Point of Sale (registration of patient, which was done

manually through Test Requisition Form till that time) and process for monthly consumption of material. We took the call of going with POS first. Therefore, in 2013, we decided to automate the process of registration through the e-Registration application and hosted this application on cloud.

What benefits have you realized after moving to Microsoft Azure? We needed high availability of servers, scalability, compute power and manageability. Microsoft Azure has successfully fulfilled these requirements. Today, about 35% of the company’s network business is on cloud. In our industry, the KPI is Turn Around Time, and the biggest impact has been an average reduction of 15% in the Turn Around Time per sample post the movement to cloud. There has been substantial saving of time in per patient report uploading. Today, we can send reports back to the patients with savings of 1.5 hours. Also, there has been reduction in pre analytical errors and check against revenue leakage. Further, we have over 99.5% uptime in our SLAs with Microsoft.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

ECFY CONSULTING

Azure Enables ECFY Consulting Build its LogiCloud Solution for Logistics Industry

E APURVA MANKAD Founder and CEO, ECFY Consulting

CFY consulting is a technology company delivering solutions to the supply chain industry. While building LogiCloud, a multi-stakeholder platform to provide visibility across the supply chain to shippers and 3PL by connecting them to logistics service providers, the company decided to leverage the power of Microsoft Azure. Apurva Mankad, Founder and CEO, ECFY Consulting shares how this decision made all the difference.

Transformation Heroes

What challenges were you facing that led you to consider moving to the cloud? LogiCloud offers next generation technology to a long tail of service providers. The design team at LogiCloud wanted to make it a platform that could ingress data from thousands of devices, data streams from hundreds of APIs, and images from several thousand mobile devices. At the same time, LogiCloud had to offer a low entry point in terms of pricing. Also, there had to be some free options for smaller logistics companies. Given all these considerations, cloud came across as a natural choice to build the LogiCloud platform.

What were the factors that led you to decide in favor of Microsoft Azure? Microsoft Azure had just launched the IoT hub followed by the IoT suite. The LogiCloud team evaluated the solutions and found them to be the best fit for their technology and business needs. The Azure Event Hub was the solution that could ingress data from possibly thousands of sources simultaneously. Streaming Analytics could help to look at streams of data and detect important events as per business rules.

Can you throw some light on the benefits that you have accrued from Azure? Azure has helped us in building our LogiCloud offering for the logistics

ECFY Consulting

“Azure Document DB and Azure AD B2C are helping us store very large amount of data and aiding in onboarding thousands of users.” —APURVA MANKAD

industry. LogiCloud helps our customers gain a single-window visibility from data streams originating across multiple service providers. It has made it possible for customers to proactively act for possible service failures rather than react to escalations. The customers can login to LogiCloud, search for an order number and find where a given vehicle is on a map. They can also get stagewise tracking data from multiple service providers in a single window. They can now give confident answers to their stakeholders regarding status of their supply chain. The Azure cloud platform, on which LogiCloud has been built, has made this possible. We received considerable help from the Microsoft team as they arranged for multiple one-on-one sessions, webinars, video links and concalls to clear the architectural doubts of the LogiCloud team. The team then started building separate solutions targeted at IoT, API streams and mobile data, and image applications. With the help of Microsoft team and considerable online resources, LogiCloud team was able to launch the solution within three months of conceptualization.

P lease highlight certain aspects of the solution that had the most significant impact on your organization? Azure Document DB and Azure AD B2C are helping us store very large amount of data and aiding in onboarding thousands of users and manage access to various solutions and features respectively. Further, PowerBI offers us the requisite dashboards and analytical capabilities across devices. In fact, LogiCloud will soon be able to predict service failures based on Azure Machine Learning algorithms applied on massive data available across service providers.

How are you planning to enhance and further expand on your Azure implementation? We are looking at some very futuristic technologies offered by Azure. Azure Data Factory, Machine Learning and Image Processing are some of the possible technologies we are considering exploring in the future. A very exciting future awaits in terms of Media Analytics to process videos and images captured on mobile devices.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

ICERTIS

Azure Powers Icertis Contract Management Platform, Helps Save $300,000 Annually

certis is the leading provider of enterprise contract management software in the cloud. The companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flagship product, Icertis Contract Management, manages sell-side, buy-side and corporate enterprise contracts across the globe by leveraging the power of the cloud.

MONISH DARDA CTO, Icertis

Monish Darda, CTO, Icertis reveals how Microsoft Azure powers the leading contract management platform, helping it achieve the fastest sustained growth rates in enterprise cloud applications.

Transformation Heroes

What were the company’s key requirements, and why did you consider cloud? We started building the Icertis Contract Management platform as a ‘born-in-thecloud’ enterprise application that could go cloud-scale. For this initiative, we were looking at a cloud provider who could also be the go-to-market partner for us that enterprises would trust. The cloud platform had to meet our objective of building the best contract management platform globally.

How did you zero in on Microsoft Azure? What helped you decide in its favor? Our decision wasn’t purely based on features and functions, but also on aspects like – is it easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and is it trusted by the world’s largest enterprises. After an extensive evaluation of all options Microsoft Azure came across as a platform best fit for our needs. We wanted to concentrate on the application logic and not on maintaining the underlying infrastructure and platform services. Hence, the service provider would have had to have a comprehensive roadmap and plan for cloud-scale applications, which Microsoft had. With more than $15 billion investments in its global data centers, it provides us with the largest choice of regions available (24 regions at last count and growing, including India). Azure also has one of the most

Icertis

“Azure not only has rock solid security but also offers us a true born-in-the-cloud engineering approach to an enterprise platform.” —MONISH DARDA comprehensive programs for security and compliance – a key requirement for contract management. The comprehensive Platform as a Service (PaaS) features make application development very easy, allowing us to quickly build, test, deploy and maintain application features without having to invest in tools and middleware.

data center we have logged an estimated cost savings of over $300,000 annually in hardware, maintenance and people. Further, Azure not only has rock solid security but also offers us a true bornin-the-cloud engineering approach to an enterprise platform. It has enabled an uptime of 99.9% for our customers in production.

In other words, Azure’s support for data centers around the globe, world class security and compliance, and the deployment of platform services that Icertis Contract Management could consume quickly tilted the balance in its favor. How has the deployment of Azure impacted your business?

All these have made our engineering agile, our platform go-to-cloud scale, our data secure and our customers happy.

With Azure we have become one of the world’s leading contract management platforms, with one of the fastest sustained growth rates in enterprise cloud applications. Today, some of the world’s largest enterprises (including Microsoft) run on Icertis Contract Management on Azure. We have over 2,50,000 users and over a million contracts in 40+ languages, spanning across 90 countries, under management. Meanwhile, as compared to a private

How does Microsoft continue to help you post the implementation? As part of continuous improvement, we are constantly looking to integrate new features and partnering with Microsoft to introduce and streamline future aspects of the platform and increase our customer base. New features that are useful to Icertis Contract Management are continuously integrated into the platform as they become available (some even before they become generally available). It is critical for us to ensure that the new features of Azure that benefit our contract management platform are usable in enterprise settings as they become available.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

MANAPPURAM FINANCE LTD.

Office 365 Assures 99.9% Email Uptime While Boosting Collaboration for Manappuram Finance

anappuram Finance Ltd. was incorporated in 1992. The Kerala-based company claims to be Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first listed and highest credit rated gold loan entity. The company has around 3,300 branches across 26 states and UTs with Assets under Management (AUM) of about Rs.10,000 crores and a workforce of about 18,000 employees.

MOHAN VIZHAKAT CTO, Manappuram Finance Ltd.

Mohan Vizhakat, CTO, Manappuram Finance Ltd. describes how deploying Microsoft Office 365 gave a boost to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s productivity and reliability.

Transformation Heroes

What were the key challenges before the company? Users at Manappuram were on Linux based ‘PineApp’ mail solution, which had several limitations. It was unable to handle workload of 6,000 plus users, leading to regular breakdown of the email platform. As it did not support web mail access for the large number of users, emails had to be configured on the desktop/laptop using third party proprietary software, leading to very high financial liability for compliance. The company also lacked intranet portals for different departments to keep documents and share them among employees. There was also no online meeting option and officials had to travel across India for review meetings, interviews, etc., thus incurring travel cost. Without sizeable storage, hard copies of important documents were kept in individual departments and were liable to being misplaced or damaged under certain circumstances.

How did you zero in on Microsoft? What key features or functions of the solution helped you with the decision? Among the features that attracted us was an SLA of 99.9% uptime. Since the solution was cloud based there was no need for setting up or maintaining servers in our data center and all users would be able to access mails through the web browser. As Office 365 can configure Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to achieve single sign-

Manappuram Finance Ltd.

“Office 365 SharePoint enabled department-wise intranet portals to be created for storing and sharing important documents in a secure manner, thereby avoiding printing cost.” —MOHAN VIZHAKAT on, users could log on to the domain and be automatically authenticated to Office 365. Further, email attachments could have a maximum size of 25 MB. Office 365 SharePoint enabled department-wise intranet portals to be created for storing and sharing important documents in a secure manner, thereby avoiding printing cost. By facilitating online meeting, Microsoft Skype for Business reduced travel cost and improved productivity. Microsoft OneDrive helped in uploading important files and making them available anytime, anywhere in the corporate network. Above all, we were assured of getting all the features and functionality of the latest versions of Microsoft’s server products.

How did you ease out the adoption of Office 365 in your organization? Around 16,000 users had to be trained on the new solution. The IT department made email communication and simple training materials available to every employee to enable them to make use of Office 365 with ease. Around 500 key users were given training directly by the Office 365 support team. We

formed a helpdesk comprising 10 members with access to voice and mail.

What benefits have accrued to the organization from the solution? The two most impactful aspects have been the 99.9% uptime assured by the Office 365 email solution and the business collaboration functionalities enabled by Microsoft Skype for Business. Among the other benefits of Office 365 are anytime and anywhere access to our emails, shared calendars, and the address book with an internet connection. Document sharing and workflow management system have become much easier with SharePoint, while Skype for Business has made communication easy with video calling, chatting and desktop sharing features. There have been several intangible benefits as well, including the high levels of security. As Microsoft data centers are extremely secure and well protected, our data is safe and free from attack. Also, the business now has the flexibility of expanding new built-in services and pay only for what it needs and no more. We get easy upgrades without additional costs and also data backup for different Office 365 packages.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

MAX HEALTHCARE

Dynamics CRM Helps Max Healthcare Sales Close Deals Much Faster

ax Healthcare is a wholly owned subsidiary company of Max India Ltd. Established in 1985, it is a public limited company listed on NSE and BSE. The institute operates 14 centers providing healthcare services in more than 30 disciplines.

SUMIT PURI CIO, Max Healthcare

Sumit Puri, CIO, Max Healthcare reveals how leveraging Microsoft Dynamics helped ramp up the revenues for the company.

Transformation Heroes

What were the challenges being faced by the company? One of the biggest problems was managing customer relationships. The sales team had major productivity issues with the activity tracking and daily call reporting for sales team being completely manual. There was also no automation in workflows. In the absence of real time reporting, there was a delay in information broadcasting to stakeholders. There were other bottlenecks too with segregated business processes and gaps in lead capturing on marketing promotions and during upcountry/international OPD visits of doctors. Meanwhile, caller identification was not available at the call center and campaigns were also not being tracked.

Why did you decide on Microsoft Dynamics CRM? Microsoft Dynamics CRM had several compelling functionalities. It helps in simplifying the entire marketing and sales processes. The solution has customized applications for account tagging, allows capturing of website (International/Domestic) queries, provides real time reporting, and allows campaign management. The accessibility of custom modules on mobile app and facilitation of SMS tracking were other valuable value adds. Furthermore, it enabled a 360 degrees view of the patient, leading to much better patient-clinician engagement, even outside the hospital facility.

Max Healthcare

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dynamics CRM has helped the sales staff to close deals faster across geographies while simplifying marketing and sales processes.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;SUMIT PURI

What are the key highlights from the implementation process? We divided the implementation into multiple phases for different channels. A key exercise was requirement gathering and initiating the discussion with the business team of all channels and the clinicians. We understood the gaps in terms of what they were doing currently and how the new system could work without changing the daily operations. Once we got the go ahead we started developing the production environment and preparing the training manuals in parallel. After the system readiness, we rolled out the application unit-wise and channel-wise. We also provided hands-on training to users and trained the trainers in big locations.

Any major challenges that you encountered during or post implementation? Initially we faced adoption challenges from both clinicians and sales users. For instance, the solution developed for clinicians was mainly to view the patient records in a 360 degrees view window. However, we received the feedback

that there are challenges in maintaining the manual records for S&M team. So we created SMS based technology to overcome this problem and that simplified the process of data entry into the system. Over time, with continuous support and training, we were able to roll out the solution across the enterprise for all sales staff and clinical users.

What benefits have accrued to the organization from the solution? Dynamics CRM has helped the sales staff to close deals faster across geographies while simplifying marketing and sales processes. There has been a marked improvement in the productivity of sales staff for managing their activities, tasks, campaigns, sales dashboards, etc. The CRM solution has also led to real time capturing of international and referral leads, enabling the discovery of new customers in both international and domestic markets, leading to increased revenues. We have also witnessed real time call disposition at the call center, as much as 40% lead conversions through appointments, and tracking of web queries for international patients.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

NARAYANA HEALTH

With Azure Narayana Health’s Performance Has Leap Frogged by 90-95%

eadquartered in Bengaluru, Narayana Health operates a national network of hospitals in India. It has grown to 23 hospitals, 7 heart centres and a network of primary care facilities across India and one hospital in the Cayman Islands. Narayana Health’s mission is to deliver high quality and affordable healthcare services. In aggregate, its centres provide advanced levels of care in over 30 specialties.

KUMAR KV VP and Head – IT, Narayana Health

Kumar KV, VP and Head – IT, Narayana Health reveals how Microsoft Azure improved efficiency in the organization.

Transformation Heroes

What was the top business challenge that prompted you to evaluate cloud? Narayana Health runs critical business and systems applications to cater to dayto-day operations. In August-September 2014, there were lots of unscheduled application outages and infrastructure issues. These issues adversely impacted end user productivity. Hence, we started to look out for a potential solution to fix these problem areas. In addition to resolving the applications and the infrastructure issues, we also wanted to build a platform to enable us to address the future business requirements. This triggered the transition to a cloud based infrastructure.

Please throw light on the evaluation process for selecting the cloud service provider. Any cloud vendor evaluation has to be done based on the requirements of business. We prepared a vendor selection tool that had a matrix of the requirements and the vendors meeting those requirements. We identified 99 requirements in all, which ranged from data center related attributes and performance related attributes to security, etc. Cost was also an important factor in the evaluation process. Our hospital is for the middle class, so whichever solution we build has to be economical. The need was to strike a balance between performance, cost and quality. We evaluated Indian as well as multinational cloud service providers.

Narayana Health

Azure has helped us in tremendously improving the performance of the core HIS application.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;KUMAR KV Among the frontrunners were Microsoft Azure, Google and AWS. Eventually, after the evaluation, we narrowed down to two providers - Microsoft Azure and AWS.

What tilted the balance in favor of Microsoft Azure? After the evaluation, Microsoft Azure and AWS were neck-to-neck. To come to a conclusion, we decided to do a performance benchmarking exercise between the two. For the next 4-6 months we did extensive load testing for all the critical applications (ERP, etc.) on the two platforms. The applications team documented everything. It was found that their results were comparable. However, what clinched the deal with Microsoft Azure was their data center strategy. Microsoft is aggressively setting up data centers in India, with Pune and Chennai planned at that time.

Which applications have you migrated to Azure? As of today, we run the Hospital Information System, ERP, Human Capital Management, Active Directory, Identity Management, Intensive Care (IKARE) app, Attendance Management System, and Mobile Device Management on cloud. There are a few more fringe applications

that we have migrated to Azure like payroll app for external partners.

Most CIOs believe that security is an issue when it comes to cloud. How did you ensure security of your critical data? We have a virtual private cloud. As a result, our data is within national borders. The virtual private cloud is not open to the external world. All the traffic is firewalled - at the network level and at all entry and exit points. On the application front, we have an Identity Management system in place which ensures role-based controls.

How has migrating to Azure benefited Narayana Health? Azure has helped us in tremendously improving the performance of the core HIS application. In the healthcare environment there is always a long queue of patients. However, the performance improvement at the HIS application level helped us deliver efficient and reliable service, shortening the queues. Also, with Azure the performance has leap frogged tremendously by as much as 90-95%. At the end of the day we are able to deliver an optimized end-user experience.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

PALADION NETWORKS

Office 365 Lends Cost Benefits to Paladion While Improving Controls

anaged security service provider Paladion Networks has over a decade of experience in serving organizations from around the globe. It is currently actively servicing more than 700 clients worldwide. The company assists its partners to improve their business operations by leveraging its industrywide experience, expertise in cutting-edge technology and an extensive portfolio of services. When it came to enhancing its own productivity, the company decided to rely on Microsoft.

DR. JAGAN VAMAN EVP & Corporate Development Officer – Strategy and New Business Initiatives, Paladion Networks

Dr. Jagan Vaman, EVP & Corporate Development Officer – Strategy and New Business Initiatives, Paladion Networks and Ramesh Thampi, VP – IT Management & Information Security, Paladion Networks talk about how Office 365 has lent cost benefits to the organization while improving knowledge sharing.

Transformation Heroes

What were the top challenges confronting your company? How did you intend to overcome them? DR. JAGAN VAMAN: Our biggest challenge was the presence of multiple office productivity solutions from multiple vendors. On one hand, it was taking us too much time in managing the large number of vendors, on the other, the solutions were also not tightly integrated together. Lack of scalability was also an issue. Besides, the service levels offered by the vendors were not up to the mark. To overcome all these issues, we wanted a vendor that could come across as a one-stop-shop for all our needs. Why did you decide to go with Microsoft? DR. JAGAN VAMAN: One of the main reasons we chose Microsoft was that it offered the entire spectrum of solutions right from office productivity solutions to enterprise class ERP and CRM solutions. As a customer, there was no need to go to multiple vendors. The solutions were bundled together with a tight integration of their office productivity solution.

“We are leveraging Skype for Business that lets us collaborate with anyone, anywhere, on any device, with security and control.” —DR. JAGAN VAMAN we are a complete Microsoft house. I would like to underline the exemplary work done by Microsoft’s partner, Sonata. They stood by our side and provided excellent support and service.

How have you enabled ease of use and ease of access for employees post the deployment? DR. JAGAN VAMAN: Through Office 365 we can manage our CRM and ERP from anywhere. Once we disable it at one place, the access to a user sitting anywhere is disabled. This has helped improve ease of use. Whether it is collaboration or someone wanting to

Security and privacy protection under the Microsoft umbrella was another key aspect that led us to decide in its favor. Finally, Microsoft was price competitive, and the level of enthusiasm and response from their team was phenomenal. With all these considerations in mind we decided to deploy Microsoft Office 365.

RAMESH THAMPI: People were already familiar with Word and Excel, and they were happy to get them online. Today,

Paladion Networks

RAMESH THAMPI VP – IT Management & Information Security, Paladion Networks

access the ERP and CRM from mobile from anywhere, it is all now possible. This creates zero distance to customers as our customer interactions are faster and deeper, resulting in more business.

How has Office 365 helped you in driving down costs? DR. JAGAN VAMAN: We are leveraging Skype for Business that lets us collaborate with anyone, anywhere, on any device, with security and control. It has been very useful for us as any number of people can log in, and depending on the last mile connectivity we are able to conduct one or two days of meetings on Skype itself. This way our travel costs have come down considerably, by as much as 20-30%. We have created our intranet portal on SharePoint, and Yammer has been integrated into it. We use a combination of SharePoint and Yammer for knowledge sharing. For instance, if someone has done a great project, he/she can share their story on Yammer and our process excellence team will create a case study or training program around it. That creates zero distance to employees. Such knowledge capture was not possible earlier. Our employee engagement has definitely improved and we are confident that our investments will be recovered within two years.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

PHOENIX MILLS LTD.

Office 365 Simplifies Email and Improves Productivity by 15% for Phoenix Mills Ltd.

hoenix Mills is set to take on the challenge of redefining lifestyle in Indian cities - be it mega retail malls, entertainment complexes, commercial space or hospitality units. It has been a pioneer in converting mill land into modern, multi-use integrated property and is at the cutting edge of developing retailled mixed-use destination assets.Â

SUNIL NAIR AVP-IT, Phoenix Mills Ltd.

Sunil Nair, AVP-IT, Phoenix Mills Ltd. talks about how Microsoft Office 365 is helping ease out the bottlenecks in the email journey of the organization.

Transformation Heroes

W hat were the key business and technology challenges before Phoenix Mills that prompted you to consider deploying Microsoft Office 365? Phoenix Mills had deployed netCORE’s solution for its email service. The solution, however, had several shortcomings. The biggest issue pertained to calendar and contact not getting synced seamlessly. The top management were not getting regular calendar requests and meeting schedules were not clearly distributed. The situation compelled us to look for an alternative solution.

H ow did you zero in on Microsoft Office 365? We evaluated various solutions, including netCORE. However, Microsoft Office 365 offered much more functionalities compared to netCORE. Its features, such as availability of Exchange on cloud, simple email, calendar and contact sync, unlimited archival of emails, good security and availability of 50 GB space made a very compelling business case for us. On the other hand, netCORE offered limited space and we had to host on our own server.

H ow cost competitive was Office 365 as compared to competing solutions? Microsoft gave us multiple pricing options. Based on different plans (Enterprise E1, Enterprise E3, Enterprise

Phoenix Mills Ltd.

“Once Office 365 went live, it made life easy for everybody. Our emailing process, leveraging Office 365, has become a lot simpler and easier.” —SUNIL NAIR

E5), we were offered different functionalities for different profiles in the company. This helped us in bringing the cost down.

What were the key highlights of the implementation process? The implementation process was smooth with no downtime at all. In fact, we didn’t even get to know that there was a transition. We were on the existing solution one night and the next morning we were on Office 365. The transition was that seamless. The entire project took only about 10 to 15 days. Presently, we have moved only the top management on to the new solution. Microsoft has helped us at every stage of the project and we are satisfied with their support.

the first phase was to test the solution rigorously on multiple devices. The deal was that once we saw it working fine we would extend it to next level of employees.

Post deployment, what tangible and intangible benefits have accrued to the company? Once Office 365 went live, it made life easy for everybody. Our emailing process, leveraging Office 365, has become a lot simpler and easier. The calendar and contacts are now in sync with each other. All those users who have been covered under Office 365 now get regular calendar requests and meeting schedules. Besides, there is archival of emails and availability of 50 GB of space. As a result, there has been an increase in productivity by as much as 15%.

Why did you decide to move only to the top management? Will other employees also be covered? The reason we decided to move only the top management to Office 365 in

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

RAGE FRAMEWORKS

Office 365 Takes Huge Load Off Backup Infrastructure for Rage Frameworks

age Frameworks offers services to global companies to address credit risk assessment and financial analysis needs. It analyses and monitors financial and non-financial challenges and offers analytics solutions. The company boasts of deep expertise in the areas of financial services, knowledge based technologies, natural language processing and computational linguistics.

ANURAAG CHATTERJEE Associate Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT Rage Frameworks

Anuraag Chatterjee, Associate Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT, Rage Frameworks, discusses how Microsoft Office 365 enabled the company to get more from less.

Transformation Heroes

What roadblocks was the company facing that prompted for a change? We were facing challenges around managing the existing software in terms of infrastructure, upkeep costs, support resource costs as well as the cost for backup and archiving infrastructure. There were also additional licensing costs for security measures like multifactor authentication and software upgrade costs. Furthermore, we also had to grapple with the ever-increasing user demand for more mailbox space. All these factors were limiting our growth and taking a considerable toll on the business. There was productivity loss of as much as 20%.

What led you to decide in favor of Microsoft Office 365 as a solution for these challenges? After careful review and consideration, we realized that the tight integration and collaboration provided by Microsoft Office 365 in the areas of messaging and video collaboration was second to none. In our line of business, we have to work closely with our clients. In the absence of a proper seamless collaboration solution, we were having difficulties in connecting with our clients. Microsoft Office 365 came across as a one stop shop addressing all our challenges. Hence, it became an easy choice for us.

an you briefly describe the C implementation process? Moving an email platform is always a

Rage Frameworks

“The easy collaboration options with tools like Skype for Business, SharePoint, and OneDrive make for a great user experience and higher end user satisfaction.” —ANURAAG CHATTERJEE

big task with lots of work required both at the user end and the support end. Besides, the legacy dependencies are never easy to circumvent. However, with the seamless integration of Office 365 with the help of the strong partner ecosystem that Microsoft has, we were able to plan the implementation with minimal user impact. We have decided to go for a phased migration of the 600 users. The first phase involved the migration of 200 users on to Office 365. We expect the entire project to be completed in the next few weeks.

In which area within the organization has Office 365 made the most significant impact? The immediate benefit has been in the form of huge load off our backup infrastructure. One very big challenge that we were facing was the erratic and dynamic storage needs of our end users. It was a major pain point to have huge backup infrastructure in place and also manage local PST files and backup for these users on DVD/Flash drive media. This also led to information security issues reaching a new high. With Office

365, this was mitigated to a great extent, thereby giving us the much needed peace of mind.

What were the other benefits that resulted from the deployment of Office 365? The other big benefit comes from not having the need for support staff that was required for managing the earlier software. This has led to headcount benefits and peace of mind, which in turn, lets us focus on our primary business. The easy collaboration options with tools like Skype for Business, SharePoint, and OneDrive make for a great user experience and higher end user satisfaction.

How would you like to further enhance your usage of Office 365 and build on the platform in the near future? We are currently in the first phase of our deployment. Going forward, we have plans to deploy and use all services, such as Yammer, EMS, etc. to make this a robust solution in the longer run.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

SKP BUSINESS CONSULTING

SKP Chooses Office 365 Over Google for Work, Achieves Full Compliance and 99.99% Uptime

KP Business Consulting is a long established and rapidly growing professional services group located in seven major cities across India. It specializes in providing business and tax guidance and accounting services to international companies that are currently conducting or initiating business in India as well as those expanding overseas. The company serves over 1,200 clients from over 45 countries.

MITUL SHAH Senior Manager â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT SKP Business Consulting

Mitul Shah, Senior Manager - IT, SKP Business Consulting discusses how the company solved its multiple challenges with Office 365.

Transformation Heroes

What were the key business and technology challenges before the company? As a company, SKP was growing at a fast pace. From 200-300 employees at the time we were looking to ramp up to 500-800 in a few months, and eventually up to 1,100 employees over the next one and a half years. Since we had the mailing servers in-house their maintenance required a lot of efforts. Expensive human resources had to be hired to ensure they were up and running besides the additional cost of AMC on the hardware. There were also issues in providing rack space, ensuring the right temperature for the servers and provisioning for back up. As the number of users increased, we also required keeping track of operating system licenses and ramping up the storage.

What made you choose Microsoft Office 365? We didn’t have 24X7 IT operations. Therefore, there was always the risk of issues cropping up at night. In such a scenario, the mail admin would have to travel to the office in the middle of the night to rectify them. While we were fortunate that there was no major downtime, the fear always persisted. To overcome this once and for all, we decided to adopt cloud. We evaluated Microsoft Office 365 and Google for Work in parallel. We were already using Microsoft Exchange on premise and the users were comfortable on it. Also, the

SKP Business Consulting

“The new solution has several applications, such as Word and Excel, integrated into the mailbox. This has led to ease-of-use for the employees.” —MITUL SHAH

mailbox, calendar and other functions in Office 365 were simpler than Google for Work. Besides, the migration from Exchange to Exchange was very simple and seamless. All these factors helped us decide in favor of Microsoft Office 365. Today, we have around 1,100 users on the solution.

How would you define the benefits of moving to Office 365? We are ensured of 99.99% uptime without any additional efforts from our end. Earlier, there was a restriction of 2 GB per mailbox. However, with Office 365, each user gets 50 GB of storage space. The new solution has several applications, such as Word and Excel, integrated into the mailbox. This has led to ease-of-use for the employees. By leveraging Skype for Business, SKP has taken collaboration to a whole new level. Employees no longer have to travel extensively to our six offices spread across the country. It also helps us in scaling up the users on the fly. We no longer have to keep upgrading the infrastructure and rolling out updates.

How has the new solution impacted compliance for the company? With the implementation of Office 365, the area of compliance has been positively impacted the most. Today, we can confidently say that we are 100% compliant. There is clear visibility into the exact number of licenses we have. This was not the case earlier. With an increase or decrease in the number of users, it was tough to keep track of the total licenses we had. We no longer have to downgrade or upgrade licenses as it is taken care of by Microsoft.

How are you planning to build on Office 365 in the near future? We have started integrating other applications such as SharePoint and Skype for Business with Office 365. Going forward, we are also looking at CRM online from Microsoft.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES

TECHNOVA IMAGING

Office 365 Provides a Shot in the Arm for TechNovaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Digitization Project

T PIYUSH KAPADIA CFO & CIO, TechNova Imaging

echNova Imaging Systems ranks among the leading suppliers of total imaging solutions for the graphic communications industry globally. Its complete integrated solutions offering includes consumables, software solutions, systems and services for the publishing, print, textile, packaging, signage, engineering and photo industries. TechNova claims to be the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fifth largest manufacturer of printing plates and its products are marketed to over 68 countries. Piyush Kapadia, CFO & CIO, TechNova Imaging discusses how Microsoft Office 365 has enabled security along with flexibility for the company.

Transformation Heroes

What were the key challenges before the company for which you considered deploying Microsoft Office 365? There were several reasons that forced us to look for an alternative to our existing email solution. In the existing email solution there was a limitation in the Personal Storage Table (PST) size. We also wanted to migrate our email on to the cloud and ensure that there was data security and backup for key users in the company. We also wished to remain current on the latest version of Office suite at a reasonable cost.

What key features of Office 365 helped you decide in its favor? The decision to align with Microsoft Office 365 was not a tough one for us. The solution offered several functionalities that were a perfect fit for our requirements. The pay per use option for Office on cloud came across as a big advantage for us. We could save on a lot of CAPEX. The value-add provided by Skype for Business, OneDrive and Office suite were all simply too strong for the business to ignore.

Can you briefly describe the implementation process? The implementation took us two months. This was the time taken to transfer our entire mailbox. Since we wanted to control the incoming email traffic, we implemented a hybrid solution that was a mix of both components - cloud as well as on-premise. There were a

TechNova Imaging

“Using SharePoint as a platform, we have now embarked on digital conversion of nearly 2 million documents across organization functions.” —PIYUSH KAPADIA few minor challenges, but overall the implementation went off smoothly.

How have you benefited from the implementation of Office 365? Office 365 has enabled our users to get the latest and updated office product. Video conference through Skype for Business has made it very easy to communicate. With it, we have simplified our infrastructure as there is now a single platform for calling, conferencing, video and sharing. SharePoint portal for our electronic document management had the most significant impact for the organization as it provided a shot in the arm for our digitization project. In fact, digitization was high up on our priority list. Using SharePoint as a platform, we have now embarked on digital conversion of nearly 2 million documents across organization functions with the objective of ease in document management and reducing burden of physical space. SharePoint portal has the advantage to upload the documents even by an outsourced thirty party through the sharing facility. On the security front, as Microsoft handles our security we don’t have to worry about it. Now we have even more control with increased privacy, transparency and refined user controls.

Further, we can configure Microsoft Office on multiple devices. This lends us a lot of flexibility - whether a user is working from office or home or is on the go, he gets a familiar and top-of-the-line set of productivity tools. On the other hand, OneDrive empowers the users to securely store all files and share them with co-workers. Each user gets 1 TB of storage and they can sync files across devices and access them anywhere, even when they are offline. It is also easy to find the files one needs within seconds through simple search. Last but not the least, users need not worry about backup and restore. With OneDrive we need not carry the data anywhere in CD or flash drive.

What are your future plans for Office 365? Going forward, we want to maximize the use of Yammer to drive internal social networking for the company. We are also exploring actively migrating our corporate intranet platform onto the latest SharePoint based portal format, which will improve our users’ experience and bring in fresh vibrancy into the internal communication mode.

The first edition of Transformation Heroes set in motion our endeavor to reach out to the CIOs and bring to the fore the exemplary work they are doing in making their organizations more productive, efficient and agile through the use of technology. We highlighted 15 such people and called them the ‘Transformation Heroes’ for being the harbinger of their respective organization’s growth and expansion. To read these case studies go to: www.issuu.com/dynamiccio/docs/transformation_heroes

The second edition of Transformation Heroes continues this journey of identifying and celebrating these heroes.

TRANSFORMATION HEROES EDITION II

Showcasing New Technology-Led Productivity Impact Stories