When India-based finance company Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services migrated to its new blade servers and Oracle business software, the national head of information systems and technology, Suresh A. Shanmugam, faced some issues. He realised that the extent to which his organisation was stretched, throughout the Indian subcontinent, would inevitably pose problems for the firm's overall IT infrastructure.
With a key focus on rural and semi-urban areas, Mahindra Finance provides financing for utility vehicles (UVs), tractors and cars. Already having a network of 443 branches and about 2,500 employees, the company is now expanding rapidly across India, particularly to remote, rural villages and semi-urban towns. Hundreds of kilometres apart, these places often have poor or no Internet connectivity.
As a non-banking finance company, Mahindra Finance's core business activities centre around the collection of the equated monthly instalments (EMIs) of loans disbursed. According to Shanmugam, the number of contracts, materialising towards the end of a month, scales up to about 15,000.
Tyranny of distance
"Over time and with more distant branches being set up, timely information flow over the network became a problem," he says. "And once the company migrated to data-heavy Oracle-based systems, sizing was becoming a major issue. In effect, since a large volume of data was involved, we had even thought of splitting the database to different state levels."
Since the organisation was already using Citrix Presentation Server for application delivery, Shanmugam's team realised this plan was not workable, because it could have a negative impact on the speed at which end-users access their applications and data, primarily due to the deployment of Citrix in the most remote locations.
Already, Mahindra Finance users had started to notice a slowdown during downloading sessions, says Shanmugam. From an administrator's perspective, the engineers did not have a clear picture of what was happening within the infrastructure. They were unable to see what files were being transferred and where they were being sent, or even how they were being sent.
The lack of clarity was threatening to limit how Shanmugam's team could manage the overall network that, not only has an ever-increasing data load, but was also stretched by the rapidly-expanding branch network.
Simultaneously, the company planned to launch a slew of other financial products and services in the housing finance and personal loans segments. Branches would have to be up and running in record time and users should be able to access all core applications, to make products available to customers much faster.
"In the rapidly expanding and fickle rural finance market, speed of decisions is a critical factor in determining the success of loan disbursals and collections," says Shanmugam.
So he began looking for a wide area network (WAN) optimisation tool that would help manage his company's network bandwidth efficiently, easily delivering bulk data and sharing huge files up to 50 MB.
Such a tool could accelerate a broad range of applications accessed by distributed enterprise users, via eliminating redundant transmissions, compressing and prioritising data, and streamlining protocols.
Since Mahindra Finance has been using the Citrix Presentation Server, Shanmugam decided to adopt Citrix's WANScaler 8810 Series Server for about 750 concurrent users in branches across India, including remote locations.
They are now able to access applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounting, voice over IP (VoIP), Microsoft Exchange and Web-based applications.
These users-administrators, data entry operators, and middle management professionals-
New possibilities emerge
With the WANScaler in place, controlling and monitoring network activities at branches is now possible, according to Shanmugam. This will ultimately address the overcrowding of the network's bandwidth.
"We know what types of files are being sent between different locations. I don't have to worry about any number of users being added, and application accessibility is much more streamlined."
Previously, to minimise network clogging, Shanmugam could only advise the users to download during non-office hours and he could not enforce it. His administrators are now able to control downloading at all times.
"Earlier we didn't know how much a user is downloading. Today I have knowledge of the number of downloads and what he is downloading. I can even restrict what a person downloads."
Shanmugam's network administrators can configure applications with a QoS priority and minimum bandwidth, thus guaranteeing predictable application response times in heavily congested environments.
The WANScaler has helped eliminate unwanted broadcast signals that have contributed to the slowing down of the entire network.
The terminals, located throughout India, tend to send unnecessary messages such as notification alerts back to the central server taking up vital bandwidth space.
Automatic detection
Shanmugam's team can now define policies for the system, while automatically detecting and throwing out signals that are deemed unimportant.
An added bonus for the set-up personnel is that the network monitoring tools, firewalls and applications did not need any reconfiguration or modification when the WANScaler was installed, he says.
With WANScaler, applications can be delivered faster over existing networks. "Clearly, Citrix WANScaler has accelerated application delivery to dispersed branch offices over the wide area network. Users now spend their time using applications instead of waiting for them to load."
The WANScaler has also given Shanmugam's engineers a plug-and-play capability, making it easier to set up IT facilities for the branches, helping the IT teams keep pace with their expansion.
The network set-up, including the number of users and bandwidth allowed and training for the users, can be done at the main HQ. What is left for the IT teams to handle is to have the hardware communication facilities set up at the branches.
Shanmugam estimates that previously, five months would have passed for set-up and training to be completed.
"In our business we want everything to be quick," says Shanmugam. "Even our commitment to business is that, within two days, we have to give the disbursement. If that is the case, we are finished if we take more than two months.
"Today when a branch is going to open on X date, we can now say by X plus two, we will ensure connectivity and everything else."
