ESSAR GROUP, the $24 billion telecommunications -to-oil conglomerate, has aggressive expansion plans, with one group company Aegis alone making an average of five acquisitions every 12 months in the last three financial years. Consolidation of IT infrastructure, then, was a given. N. Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT Infrastructure and Technology at the group is overseeing the consolidation of the company’s IT infrastructure, a process that started close to four years back, and includes putting in place a state-of-the-art communications infrastructure.

“From $5 billion five years back, we’ve grown almost five fold to $24 billion,” Prabhu points out. “I do not want to maintain multiple set ups.

”What Prabhu and his team were looking for was a communications solution that would allow them to exploit all the tools of modern unified communication. At the same time the platform had to be amenable to integration of disparate legacy systems so that they could be managed from one centralised location.

Needed: A Cost-Efficient Solution
It all began with Essar incurring high costs for communications between employees located across different facilities globally. That Essar had multiple IT locations managing different systems was another factor influencing the decision to consolidate as Essar expanded.

Employee travel was on the rise and considering the economically challenging global environment, Essar was keen to cut expenditure. The need was a cost-effective and efficient solution that would reduce travel.

The acquisitions naturally brought in disparate systems and the attendant growth-related challenges: multiple locations in multiple countries with little standardisation. Communication was becoming difficult, and cost was becoming a problem — not just operational cost, but also that of management and technology maintenance.

On the communications front, Prabhu and his team were looking at centralising their operations with common facilities such as audio and video conferencing, voice mail, and VOIP.

Integrated Solution
Using technology from Avaya, the chosen communications platform provider, “We deployed applications for conferencing, centralised management and mobility,” Prabhu said.

Prabhu’s team, was already familiar with an earlier Avaya platform — CM 3.  
They then had the option of upgrading it to a newer version, CM5, and extend the functionality to all the users. Instead of upgrading existing set ups, what Prabhu decided was to procure a telephonic exchange from the vendor and integrate both CM3 and CM5. “This has been done in India for the first time,” he said.

Essar is following a phased approach to implement and deploy the hardware and the applications across its various sites. As of now, a Session Manager and other components are being deployed.

The deployment allows Essar to exploit the advantages of open standards: The platform is “reliable, scalable and secure, and enabled Essar Group to further save on communications costs,” Prabhu says. It has allowed Essar to put in place a single, integrated dial-plan across the organisation; the session manager facilitates centralised routing with smarter on-net calling.

Communication infrastructure management costs are coming down, as the deployment rolls out across the group, with enterprise-wide architecture and centralised management. Essar has been able to retain existing communication features, while consolidating and centralising applications such as messaging and conferencing.

Huge Benefit
The benefits for the group are both qualitative and quantitative. On the qualitative side – there is easy access to all, anybody can contact any location through VOIP. Essar has configured conference bridges for both audio and video meetings.

A mobility application allows anybody in Essar Group to login within their network and have a conference call. Essar was earlier paying to a private service provider to access this service, so the rates they were paying were much higher. The in-house conferencing solution has significantly pared this cost.

The integrated, centrally managed communication platform has simplifed Essar’s complex communications networks, reduced infrastructure costs and facilitated quick delivery of new voice, video, messaging, presence, and web applications to employees everywhere.

Services such as Netcalling, and applications such as Voice Mail, Conferencing, and any third-party applications can be rolled out across sites using sequencing from one data centre. There is now Centralised Management, Centralised Voice Mail, and Centralised Audio Conferencing.

The Session Manager allows for sites to be added at a later stage as and when required. The Session Manager significantly reduces inter-office communication costs by utilising SIP and enabling CUG calling. Additional features such as audio conferencing facility for the entire group within the CUG network through the Centralized Meeting Exchange also delivers further savings.

“It is a huge benefit for me,” Prabhu says. “Also the usage of any device; for example I can use an iPad and all the collaboration tools and at the same time can extend it to BlackBerry or any other device seamlessly.” This open architecture with the corresponding flexibility is benefitting the entire group, he says.

Roadmap
“We have prepared a roadmap and based on that roadmap we are operating existing set ups and at some places we are replacing existing telecom exchange with Avaya,” Prabhu says. Essar is using Flare POC now. “They have given us a few POC equipments on Flare, the smartphone. We have already successfully tested a POC in our environment. Now we have ordered 25 Flare equipments.”

The plan is to integrate Essar’s SAP CRM with the Avaya platform.

“The integration is already going on. They want to bring all the SAP, internet and all the backend access through that on Flare,” Prabhu explains.

The roadmap also includes the creation of a DR strategy for the existing communications platform.