Founded in 1993, Polaris Software is a banking and insurance software company that offers solutions for core banking, corporate banking, wealth and asset management, and insurance. With its headquarters in India, the company has operations in countries like the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Singapore, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Chile, Hong Kong and Korea. It has sales, marketing and development centres spanning 24 international offices and four global development centres.

Over time, the company recognised the need to upgrade its traditional communications infrastructure to one that facilitated feature-rich and seamless connectivity. This was done keeping in mind its twin goals of maintaining a leadership position in the Indian IT and ITeS space, as well as ensuring business continuity.

tele.net traces the development of its IT and telecom set-up...

Legacy system

The company initially had a fairly simple communications framework. It used email, intercoms and telephone lines for internal and external communication. "Dumb terminals" were also in use in the early days.These were basically display monitors that had no processing capabilities. In other words, they were simply output devices that accepted data from the CPU.

Also in use was an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, along with two parallel networks for voice and data that comprised traditional point-to-point links. This network was essentially a "mesh" set-up. For voice requirements, a TDM network was used.

According to Balakrishnan V., partner and chief information officer, this system was complex and restrictive with a need for "routing" traffic between the offices through available point-to-point links. The system had practically no back-up. Hence, if one point of interconnection failed, it impacted a large part of the network.

The shift

The basic agenda for Polaris was to achieve greater operational efficiency, lower costs and streamline the communications channels between various branch offices and with clients and partners.

To achieve this, the IT major first upgraded and added to its wide area network (WAN) infrastructure. It replaced all the leased lines as a medium of interand intra-branch connectivity with the superior MPLS cloud topology.

MPLS, as a medium of connectivity, gave the company several advantages like data back-up and disaster recovery capability. The medium also provided the company adequate flexibility for future upgrades, and was a relatively cheap option to deploy compared to other mediums of connectivity. The company also opted for multiple last mile technologies, including a metro Ethernet set-up.

In terms of applications, the company continued with the ERP system and added customer relationship management (CRM). The ERP system helped the company to automate and link all its business processes by combining the data of formerly separate applications into a synchronised structure across multiple systems.

CRM helped the company in sales forecasting, task integration and staying connected, even when on the move. The company can now capture, update and share information on all prospective leads and projects, and keep track of bid dates and other project scheduling information.It can also rate projects for bidding based on configurable criteria, and forecast project revenue effectively.

Polaris also employed other useful tools like voice over internet protocol and audio, video and web conferencing. The IT major also set up two data centres in Chennai and Hyderabad to perform functions like ensuring server uptime and data recovery, apart from supporting hardwareand network-centric operations. For network security, several antivirus packages as well as checkpoint firewall software were employed.

Key benefits and challenges

The key benefit of the company's new communications infrastructure was substantial cost reduction and significant scalability in the overall system. Today, the only major challenge faced by Polaris is increasing bandwidth in step with business growth, without increasing telecom costs.

Polaris's timely decision to overhaul its communications infrastructure has allowed it to reap the benefits of a flexible and scalable infrastructure. Moving forward, the company wants to increase the use of video conferencing and adopt a collaborative solution so as to bring all telecom-related functions on to a common platform.