Perfetti Van Melle is a US $170 million multinational with three factories,
38 depots and four branch offices in India. While the name Perfetti Van Melle
may or may not ring a bell in most people's minds, its well-established
confectionery brands like Alpenliebe, Center Fresh, Chlor-mint, don't need any
introductions. Establishing such brands in a space where product pricing largely
varies from 50 Paise to Rs. 1 is not an easy job, especially if you have to
withstand all inflationary trends to maintain the same pricing levels. Perfetti
has successfully done this for more than a decade. But as time goes on, keeping
these brands well-established becomes tougher and tougher.
One of the ways to meet this challenge is to ensure the IT infrastructure is
agile and future ready. So when the company started out on this exercise, they
were faced with a lot of challenges. They had tower based servers, a distributed
MS Exchange environment, both of which led to higher power, cooling, space, and
maintenace costs. The travel and communication costs of the company were also
pretty high. Due to a distributed IT infrastructure, bandwidth costs were also
very high. Perfetti therefore started out with an infrastructure optimization
exercise to reduce not only their initial costs, but also the recurring costs.
Other Finalists |
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Company Scenario |
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Before Deployment |
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What was deployed |
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After Deployment |
Basant Kumar Chaturvedi, Sr. Manger- IT |
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Quite a few technologies were deployed to make this happen. At the hardware
level, they moved to HP's blade servers and SAN storage. VMware's Virtualization
technologies were deployed on top of this, and 45 servers were consolidated onto
8 blades. The MS Exchange setup, which was distributed across 8 locations, was
also centralized. These were then made available over the Internet using
Citrix's bandwidth optimization solutions. The company then deployed MS UC
solution for chat, video, and voice based collaboration, Cisco's WebEx platform
and MS SharePoint solutions for better online collaboration.
There were major cost savings from all the deployments. Virtualization
resulted in savings in power, cooling, and space costs. The Application and
Desktop virtualization resulted in anytime/anywhere and secure access to any of
Perfetti's business apps. The Exchange consolidation resulted in WAN bandwidth
savings, as well as lesser storage space utilization due to mailbox
optimization.