Dish TV Reaps Rewards with TechnoInfotech’s Open Source Solution

Admin Case Study

Dish TV Reaps Rewards with TechnoInfotech’s Open Source Solution

India’s first direct to home (DTH) entertainment service provider, Dish TV, needed a scalable solution to keep pace with the colossal volume of its e-mails. The company took the open source route and went for bulk mailing services by TechnoInfotech to weed out its communication bottlenecks.

The open source team at Dish TV

Dish TV, a division of Zee Network, has revolutionised and enhanced television viewing in the country. With an enviable number of subscribers, the DTH entertainment service provider has managed to lead the pack and keep its robust revenue stream growing. In the process, the company had to deal with a number of constraints that hampered smooth functioning. It was then that it sought refuge in open source and those early hurdles are now history.

Leveraging the magic of FOSS

In a short span of time, the IT team at Dish TV realised the need to handle its bulk mailing activities in order to streamline its business growth strategies. “It started in early 2000—as the number of subscribers rose, it got difficult to tackle the mailing activities associated with business promotion. It was then that TechnoInfotech offered us an open source solution to help manage our business promotion mailing requirements, which involved handling 5-6 million mails per month. By creating a customised solution to suit our unique needs, we benefited in the long-term. Initially, we were thinking of a hosted solution. However, deploying this open source solution was a one-time cost and the overall management of the set-up is outsourced to the vendor. We have saved a lot considering the annual cost of a hosted solution. We are now able to use the system for additional load without any extra cost. Today, our requirements have scaled up to almost four times the initial volume. We are also using Kennel, an open source application used for SMS pushing and also used as an antispam gateway, from Barricade,” says Manprit Singh, DGM, IT Infrastructure, Dish TV.

“For any organisation to grow and succeed, it is very important to cut down on the initial investments. We were able to do that with the help of open source technology. Besides, the service offered by TechnoInfotech is robust, efficient and comes with a low-maintenance cost. In a nutshell, the open source product brought smiles to the faces of those on the IT team and inspired great confidence among all users.”

The solution

So what were the tools that TechnoInfotech used to achieve the scalability to handle a mammoth and continuously growing volume of e-mails? “The system we have deployed is a customised implementation of PHPList integrated with a 20 SMTP server pool.

The total physical servers used are two. For creating a pool of 20 servers, we have used KVM virtualisation. The set-up makes use a 20 MBPS Internet circuit from our common pool. Our bulk mailing services deliver the best from the high volume SMTP gateway to ensure faster email delivery. In the process, our solution makes email marketing simpler, more effective and hassle-free for organisations. It enables them to fulfil their communication needs and eventually give their businesses a boost,” says Sanjay Gurav, a director at TechnoInfotech.

Manprit Singh adds, “For any organisation to grow and succeed, it is very important to cut down on the initial investments. We were able to do that with the help of open source technology. Besides, the service offered by TechnoInfotech is robust, efficient and comes with a lowmaintenance cost. In a nutshell, the open source product brought smiles to the faces of those on the IT team and inspired great confidence among all users.”

And did Dish TV migrate from any other platform to open source? “No, we always considered open source, even before deploying any solution across our organisation,” shares Singh.

Why open source over proprietary solutions?

At a time when organisations were still wary of adopting open source, why did Dish TV choose to adopt the source model (over proprietary solutions)? “The overall cost benefit by deploying an open source system is much higher when compared to any proprietary solution. Scalability and stability of OSS is now proven in the industry, worldwide. Plus, we get the flexibility of fine tuning the system to meet our requirements. Open source systems do not limit you in terms of the number of users, number of CPUs, etc, which is otherwise enforced by proprietary solutions. The overall hardware requirements also come down in Linux solutions, which helps save even on capital investments,” opines Singh. Currently, the company is using open source solutions only for Manprit Singh, DGM, its business promotion IT Infrastructure at Dish TV mailing activities but it is evaluating other areas in which it can deploy the right OSS tool.

Interactions with the community

The community plays a key role in enhancing the benefits of FOSS at the user level. So does Dish TV interact with the open source community? “So far, we have not come across a situation in which we had to directly connect with community for support as we have a very close association with our vendor. Working with a solution provider like TechnoInfotech, which has a team that is completely focused on delivering true open source platforms with managed services, has given us the confidence to deploy OSS without using extensive in-house resources. However, we definitely look forward to connecting with the community to explore newer areas of deployment in the future,” explains Singh.

The road ahead

Looking ahead, Dish TV plans to identify the right open source solution that can pep up its business strategies. It is also looking forward to deploying an invoicing system with the current bulk mailing solution. Talking about how the organisation tackles the issue of support, Singh says that Dish TV has outsourced this to its vendor, TechnoInfotech.

Singh has a piece of advice to those firms contemplating the deployment of open source software. “With open source software, organisations can benefit in the long term. It is the job of the IT team to look out for alternatives that can save the organisation time and money. Open source software gives you the right to choose a better alternative,” says Singh.

The case study of Dish TV is a classic example of how open source is weaving its way into businesses across the nation. In the days to come, the resistance to open source software is sure to fade away.

By Priyanka Sarkar

The author is a member of the editorial team. She loves to weave in and out the little nuances of life and scribble her thoughts and experiences in her personal blog.