Moser Baer India Limited (MBIL) engages in the manufacture and sale of optical storage media in India and abroad. The company offers a range of optical storage media products, including recordable compact discs, rewritable compact discs, recordable digital versatile discs (DVDs), rewritable DVDs, and blue laser discs. It also offers solar power products such as crystalline silicon cells and modules, as well as thin films. Furthermore, it provides information technology peripherals, which include USB drives, memory cards, DVD writers, PC peripherals, TFT monitors, UPSs, external hard drives and consumer electronics.

The company was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Delhi. It is present in over 82 countries, serviced through six marketing offices in India, the US, Europe and Japan.

Banking on telecom to modernise its operations, the manufacturing major replaced its outdated communications infrastructure with a modern set-up. The idea was to streamline operations and improve network connectivity. tele.net tracks the development of its telecom infrastructure.

Legacy system

According to the company’s spokesperson, the telecommunications set-up comprised approximately 80 servers connected to over 2,600 desktops across the organisation’s offices.

Keeping in view the company’s ever-changing business requirements, MBIL realised that its telecom infrastructure was not conducive to meet its business goals, as it was very limited and offered no prospect of business continuity. Hence, the importance of a robust and flexible infrastructure came to the fore.

The shift

Currently, the manufacturing major makes use of a multi-tiered communications infrastructure, each component of which has a defined function.

Many of the company’s offices are connected through 12 MB point-to-point leased lines. According to the spokesperson, this afforded the company always-on connectivity, supporting bandwidth-hungry applications. It has helped the company trim overheads since it is a cost-effective connectivity option.

For connecting its remote and branch offices, the manufacturing major opted for an MPLS-VPN set-up. This medium was chosen owing to its reliability, cost-effectiveness, security and flexibility in accommodating future network expansions.

MBIL opted for MS Exchange 2007 servers for messaging purposes and put in place a two-tiered infrastructure for security. This comprises Trend Micro ESS, along with mediums for content filtering and spam prevention. Currently, approximately 2,000 employees have access to this network.

Challenges and advantages

The company encountered a few challenges while making the transition from legacy systems to the new telecom infrastructure. A key challenge, for instance, was the migration of data.

However, the implementation of the new infrastructure yielded several benefits for the company, notes the spokesperson for MBIL. The company’s robust VPN set-up has helped users access in-house hosted applications even when they are not in the office. It has given them the flexibility to work remotely. Officials are also able to stay connected to the company’s network at all times through their BlackBerry devices and other mobile handsets, which give them mobile email accessibility. Apart from technological improvements, the new communications set-up has resulted in direct and indirect financial savings for the company. With this shift, users can now directly connect to the company’s exchange server from the Outlook mail server, while sitting anywhere.

The way forward

According to the spokesperson, the company has started moving to open source technology, which is robust and is maturing with time. Recently, it also moved more than 500 users from MS Office to open office software.