IBM Technology Helps Shine Up the Jewellery Sector in India

IBM  today announced it is working with leading jewellery manufacturers and retailers across India to help transform their IT infrastructure. Being home-grown, and mostly family-run, these businesses are accustomed to traditional methods of manufacturing and accountability. These jewellery businesses are now leveraging technology to ensure a world class output.

Thangamayil Jewellery (Madurai), Emerald Jewel Industries (Coimbatore), Dimexon Diamonds (Mumbai), Venus Jewels (Surat), and ACPL Exports (Agra), are embracing IBM Smarter Computing solutions to ensure better efficiencies in their production and manufacturing capabilities. IBM's solutions will help the jewellers build a highly scalable and cost-effective IT architecture. This will further ensure effective deployment of new, improved processes within their retail ventures, which in turn will help centralize their IT operations and reduce expenditure.

Emerald Jewel Industries, one of Asia's leading jewel manufacturers with retail outlets (Jewel One), design centers and state of the art manufacturing units recently consolidated its storage infrastructure with IBM. Emerald was using multiple storage boxes at its datacenter in Coimbatore for in-house designs, photographs, backup and mailbox database options. The jeweler was keen to opt for a storage platform and consolidate existing set up to cater to a minimum of 60TB usable capacity. The IBM Storwize V7000 and SAN24B switches provided a scalable solution for Emerald.

Elaborating on the announcement, Udai Goyal, Chief Operating Officer, Emerald Jewel Industries said, "We have chosen IBM for a customized, centralized solution that can help us scale our infrastructure, as we grow. The solution helps us increase efficiency, productivity, and scalability."

Thangamayil Jewellery Ltd, a well-known jeweler in Madurai, selected IBM PureFlex solution to virtualize and consolidate its existing servers to be able to operate across any location, ensuring low-cost maintenance. Said Yadeenthra Nathan SK, IT Head, Thangamayil Jewellery, "As we expand our business, it is critical for us to embrace technology to aid our growth. The IBM Pureflex solution offered us a seamless connect with our existing set-up as well as positions us for future."

Dimexon, a trusted player in the diamond industry, selected its systems and storage infrastructure portfolio to standardize and streamline business operations and optimize costs. Dimexon was keen to build a reliable platform which could consolidate its technology landscape and reduce the infrastructure spread to improve response time for its group of companies. IBM‘s solution included hardware and cloud software for Dimexon to assist in reducing its operating costs while ensuring higher performance and availability. In this first of a kind deployment in India, Dimexon will leverage Power Cloud for ERP, Business Warehousing and its Enterprise Portal across group companies.

"Technology has always been a powerful driving force behind Dimexon's development," said Vishal Mehta, Director of Dimexon, adding "IBM's powerful business solutions enable us to remain in the forefront of innovation in the diamond industry."

More recently, ACPL Exports Pvt Ltd, a leading jewelry exporter based in Agra, also selected IBM PowerLinux servers over HP and Dell to sustain business growth. The IBM PowerLinux solution integrates ACPL's ERP management system allowing the jewelry exporter to increase efficiency without increasing IT infrastructure footprint.

In another instance, IBM offered its enterprise computing and storage portfolio to Venus Jewels based in Surat. With a strong legacy in the diamond industry, offering finest quality diamonds, Venus was facing bottlenecks with the existing application servers running production on 50 percent of its actual business need. Venus decided to upgrade its servers with IBM Power 750 servers, which have now reduced the processing time in production application and provides a 30 percent increase in performance. This has given Venus a significant business advantage for its go-to-market plans.

"We went with IBM's Power Systems servers at Surat for our production and disaster recovery setup, along with the combination of V7000 Storage platform that will help us in our CCTV and surveillance requirements too. We have also adopted new, upgraded Blade Servers for our Mumbai location that will help us with seamless business continuity, providing a much better experience for all our customers across locations," said Mr. Jeejan Joseph, CIO, Venus Jewels.

Tobby Kakkamthottil, Midmarket and Inside Sales Leader, IBM India/South Asia, "We are looking forward to expanding our expertise into the jewellery sector as we understand the sensitive needs of the industry and the market in India. The key here is to provide solutions that are simple, cost effective, yet cutting edge in nature. Jewellery sector is very process driven and IT is expected to enable them to grow, be highly productive and cost effective. Our solutions to consolidate infrastructure for the jewellery sector is beginning to gain wide acceptance and we are seeing more traditional business houses embrace technology in a big way."