Advertisment

Other Finalists : Perfetti Van Melle India : Essere all Avanguardia

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

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.

Advertisment

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

Company

Scenario
Before

Deployment
  • Server sprawl resulting in higher power, cooling,

    space, and maintenance costs.

  • Distributed infrastructure was chewing up bandwidth.

  • Mobile workers not having laptops were unable to

    carry on their work while traveling.

 
What was deployed

  • Blades and SAN storage, VMware virtualization; MS

    Exchange consolidation from 8 locations to one.

  • Desktop/App virtualization using Citrix solutions.

  • MS UC & SharePoint, Cisco WebEx.

After Deployment

Basant Kumar Chaturvedi, Sr. Manger- IT

  • Lower power, cooling, space and maintenace costs.

  • Anytime/anywhere and secure access to applications on

    any device.

  • 3-10x bandwidth savings.

  • Lower travel and collaboration costs.

 

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.

Advertisment