Sundaram Mutual Finds a Reliable Partner in HCL Services

Buyer Case Study Sundaram Mutual Finds a Reliable Partner in HCL Services Sachin Chaturvedi Kannagi Shekhar IDC OPINION The India mutual fund industry is transforming to keep up with a number of changes taking place. On one hand, it has dealt with a number of regulatory developments, while on the other hand, the reeling growth rates. This transformation is forcing asset management companies to focus on three key elements customer, product differentiation, and wider distribution network. Asset management companies are realizing that they need to reassess their business strategy in order to meet the evolving needs of their customers and gain edge over competition to sustain growth and stay profitable. With this agenda in mind, asset management companies have started embracing IT as a business enabler that can help in transforming the way businesses are run, and thus get them ready for the future. Sundaram Mutual, a Sundaram Finance Group company, is a case in point. Sundaram Mutual handles almost 27 lakhs client (investors) folios and this customer base is growing by the day. This growth in business has started putting pressure on IT to perform and match the speed and expectations of internal as well as external customers. To be ready for the next phase of growth, Sundaram Mutual embarked on a journey to improve its IT infrastructure performance, focus on datacenter management, and put in place a disaster recovery management system. Some points learned from IDC's conversation with Sundaram Mutual's CTO group are as follows: Enhance IT infrastructure performance to improve business opportunity. Improving customer experience and the performance of current IT systems are part of the objectives of Sundaram Mutual's IT transformation plan. With its customer base widening and business volumes increasing every quarter, Sundaram Mutual needs to focus on delivering value to its customers through IT transformation. Select a service provider that understands customer pain points and is willing to walk that extra mile. Every organization has individual needs because of the unique characteristics of its business and IT infrastructure. Having an IT partner that can empathize with customer pain points, "think out of the box," and "be creative" to address these challenges is important given the complex nature of IT and business processes. Address the challenge of managing a wide variety of internal customers. For many organizations, there exist different categories of customers. In serving these internal customers, companies have to ensure that their internal processes are as flexible as possible and aligned with business requirements. Having a scalable and dependable IT infrastructure and unifying platforms should be top priorities for these companies. June 2014, IDC #IN246193

IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY This IDC Buyer Case Study discusses the recent conversation with the CTO of Sundaram Mutual, on the company's decision and experiences in engaging HCL Services for datacenter management and other services; which eventually led to cost savings, improvement in IT infrastructure performance, and better value to the organization. SITUATION OVERVIEW Organization Overview Sundaram Mutual is a renowned asset management company in India. It caters to a diverse group of individuals and institutional investors through a variety of equity and debt funds. The company manages domestic mutual funds besides offering portfolio management services and advisory services. Sundaram Mutual has a countrywide network consisting of several investor service centers and an international presence with offices in India, the Middle East, and a subsidiary in Singapore. Challenges and Solution Sundaram Mutual's business has been growing rapidly both organically and inorganically. This has resulted in several additional IT challenges for Sundaram Mutual, as follows: Managing a datacenter can be a daunting task. Until now, datacenter infrastructure management has been viewed as a hardware issue, but the challenge today is not with hardware, it is more about all the data that is managed, monitored, and analyzed. Sundaram Mutual's datacenter is located at Chennai, and the company needs to have an efficient datacenter management process in place and also a foolproof capacity planning that could take care of future requirements. A growing business requires agile and flexible infrastructure. Rapidly growing business and expanding customer base are forcing organizations including Sundaram Mutual to place more emphasis on the performance of current IT systems and efficient processes as a strategic asset. IT infrastructure has to be both flexible and agile in nature and supportive of corporate objectives. Sundaram wanted solutions that could scale capacity up and down based on requirements in a dynamic fashion. More importantly, the company preferred solutions that allow them to pay only for what it uses as a way to support its expansion across the region. The increasing number of IT assets puts pressure on maintenance and support mechanism. As businesses operate on a broader and more global scale, IT assets are often purchased, implemented, and maintained by different departments in remote locations. This combined with the fact that IT infrastructures are constantly changing and evolving, makes it very difficult to keep track of IT assets and their current status. Sundaram Mutual was challenged to effectively keep track of the various workstations, servers, laptops, and other components it owns and maintains. The company needs to accurately monitor its purchases and analyze system usage, to mitigate performance problems, lack of enterprise integration, and underutilization of assets. 2014 IDC #IN246193 2

The complexity of an enterprisewide network leads to management challenges. Today's companies operate in complex infrastructures. Thus, they are rapidly centralizing, automating, interconnecting, and Web enabling their infrastructures, applications, and business processes to integrate and streamline operations. At the same time, the increasingly globalized business operations, continued growth in remote/mobile workforces, and "extended enterprise" business ecosystems have created new challenges for efficient management of the network. Disaster recovery (DR) management aims to mitigate risk. In day-to-day operations, simple mistakes can lead to costly business disasters. Sometimes the damage is too serious to overcome and the company is unable to recover from the IT disaster. Sundaram realizes that DR management is necessary to mitigate business risks and prevent potential disasters. The lack of internal IT staff affects the management of the rapidly expanding IT systems. As with any organization growing rapidly, the pressure on the internal IT team to keep up with growth heightens over time, as the customer base expands and the resource provisioning increases. In such situations, organizations are required to staff the IT department, pay salaries, manage employees, and deal with everything that goes with having more employees. Sundaram Mutual realized that using a service provider will be a better alternative to alleviate the challenges that come with growth. After careful assessment of a client's requirements, HCL Services offered a wide range of customized service options to match its specific requirements that include: Server management. Sundaram Mutual was clear that it wanted to achieve higher availability, better application performance, and efficient server monitoring that could enhance existing server management methods and proactively identify issues to minimize service interruption or reporting. HCL Services offered server management to ensure that the client-server environment operates smoothly and consistently by providing day-to-day support for hardware/software at server level. These services included periodic server performance checks, which could help in allotting free capacities to absorb periodic load peaks that otherwise could cause a server overload. Sundaram Mutual was looking to make better use of existing assets by consolidating underutilized server resources and redeploying the existing capacity, and monitoring the capacity utilization to assign the free capacity as and when required. Keeping in view this specific requirement, HCL Services also offered server capacity planning and server performance monitoring solution. Moreover, HCL Services also offered remote infrastructure management services which has helped Sundaram Mutual with improved responsiveness and reduced operational risk. Asset management. With the growing number of employees, IT assets are bound to grow as well. Sundaram Mutual has witnessed significant growth in its IT assets, which has also brought to the forefront the challenge of managing these assets. HCL Infosystem offered a customized asset management solution and services to help Sundaram manage and monitor its assets. All assets such as hardware, software, spares, and so on, were tagged and recorded to ensure a timely annual maintenance/renewal and support. HCL Services also implemented an asset tracking mechanism by creating an asset (hardware/software) database. It recorded IT products information like configuration, make/model, among others, which made it easier to track the product whenever required. HCL Infosystem also monitored and managed the relocation of assets. 2014 IDC #IN246193 3

Network management. A network is a key part of the business IT system. Hence keeping it running smoothly is important for Sundaram Mutual. More than ever, Sundaram Mutual is facing the ever-increasing challenges in managing its LAN: wireless access for different devices; the decentralization of branches as employees are forced to remotely manage these locations; and the increased mobility and on-demand access to enterprise resources by customers, partners, or suppliers are all creating the need for efficient network management. Partnering with HCL Services for network management helped Sundaram in overcoming these challenges. HCL Services controls the network for Sundaram Mutual, which involves managing its LAN, WAN, and network security. HCL's LAN management services offer layered network approach (core, distribution, and access) with high performance, scalability, security, manageability, mobility, and flexible access as the key features for the LAN design. HCL Services has installed a network management system that automatically monitors active nodes, traffic, revision management, and security. The service provider also assists with fault isolation and resolution and enables Sundaram Mutual to optimize the efficiency of the network and avoid any downtime. Disaster recovery management. Sundaram Mutual has an office in Mumbai, which is also designated as a DR site for the business critical apps. HCL Services manages the disaster recovery site. The services entail a comprehensive step-by-step recovery strategy in case of a business eventuality while guaranteeing a zero shift downtime and near zero data loss. Through the DR management solution, HCL Services ensures availability, security, and recovery of Sundaram's IT infrastructure and mission-critical applications. These services also include risk assessment, recovery services for networks, security, applications and databases, and ensure near-zero data loss and near-100 percent availability of data and applications. IT infrastructure support and helpdesk services. HCL Services provides support for IT equipment such as desktops, laptops, and other IT peripherals. These services include diagnosing the problem, hardware replacement in case of fault, installation, and basic configuration of hardware. Sundaram Mutual has branches around 50 plus locations across the country, from which HCL provides preventive maintenance services for all IT assets in 38 branches. HCL Services also provides helpdesk coordinator to support call logging and escalations process. To enable a smooth call logging process, HCL has installed a centralized browser-based software tool to enable users lodge service requests. Results Partnership with HCL Services for the past few years has helped Sundaram Mutual to achieve certain key business benefits. Few of the key business benefits achieved are: Datacenter server up time by 99.9% Enhanced security Improved IT efficiency and better management of resources as a result of IT processes documentation in areas like service desk, mail management, and datacenter management Optimum utilization of hardware Adherence to business SLAs using hybrid service delivery model (onsite + remote on network solution) 2014 IDC #IN246193 4

Enhanced IT systems performance as a result of reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR) and achievement of fewer, reduced incidents per device ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE The IT infrastructure of organizations will only get increasingly complex as more technologies that need to be integrated with legacy systems are implemented. IT modernization continues to drive investments but this is accompanied by pragmatism that new investments need to achieve certain core objectives. This would include creating a flexible and agile infrastructure that can support business goals of expansion and revenue generationin an increasingly competitive environment. This also means the engagement with service providers will need to be evaluated carefully and the foundation for long-term partnerships need to be revisited. Sundaram Mutual has partnered with HCL Services for several years and is happy with the partnership and service levels. The following are some lessons for technology buyers that are experiencing the same pain points and are looking for reliable service partners: Completely understand IT needs and ambitions. One of the key reasons Sundaram Mutual has enjoyed a successful relationship and experience is that it understood exactly what it wanted from this engagement, especially how it should be linked with existing business processes. Technology buyers often jump into a technology bandwagon without a clear objective road map and changing goal posts often lead to disappointment down the road, especially if there are many stakeholders involved that have different ideas and objectives. Collaborate with trusted and reliable partners. IT investments will not be a one-off project as further technology enhancements, new platform support, and new technology are expected. SIs should be able to integrate the new technology with other IT infrastructure, in order to create a consistent customer experience. SIs that only offer standard IT solutions and do not allow customizations to meet specific requirements will not be able to garner a long-term partnership, especially for IT projects that go deep into business process transformation. Good IT partners will not only help with the new technology and solution implementation, but will also present relevant industrial experience and impart any lessons learned from previous implementations. Hence choose carefully. Constant communication between service provider and customer is important. It has often been said that IT projects often fall apart or fail because of lack of or breakdown in communication between all parties. Buyers should stipulate or demand constant review sessions from their service providers to ensure that all issues and difficulties are ironed out and resolved openly. Moreover, buyers should realize that frequent and constant interaction between all parties often gives their service providers better insights into their evolving needs, which allows SPs to be preemptive in terms of solutions provisioning and even adjusting existing relationship to tailor to the changing conditions and business needs. 2014 IDC #IN246193 5

LEARN MORE Related Research India IT Services 2012 Analysis and 2013 2017 Forecast (IDC #IN2577418V, August 2013) India Public Cloud Services Market 2012 Analysis and 2013 2017 Forecast (IDC #IN2577413V, July 2013) 2014 IDC #IN246193 6

About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. IDC India 301, 3rd floor, Tower 4B, DLF Corporate Park MG Road, DLF City Phase III Gurgaon 122002 Haryana, India 91.124.238.4816 Twitter: @IDC idc-insights-community.com www.idc.com Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit www.idc.com to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit www.idc.com/offices. Please contact the IDC Hotline at 800.343.4952, ext. 7988 (or +1.508.988.7988) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2014 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.