Essar has built a shared services environment for selected applications across the group to improve time to market and reduce cost by leveraging a flexible IT model where resources can be provisioned on the fly as per business demand.

Aligning IT with business
At Essar group, aligning IT with business strategy was a priority. As part of the IT plan, the company needed a new architectural framework that would allow the IT and business teams to closely align business and IT requirements for the group.

Over the period of last three years, Essar has moved from a segregated infrastructure model to a consolidated infrastructure model, in the process taking many initiatives such as creation of a consolidated datacenter at Hazira, consolidation of IT infrastructure services for the entire group and deployment of blade servers and enterprise storage.

Jayantha Prabhu, Head IT, Infrastructure and Technology, Essar Group says that the group has done away with the concept of infrastructure ownership by individual companies of the group wherein the applications were installed on individual servers  and there was not much importance given to the proper utilisation of the infrastructure.

“Our infrastructure was ready for the next step of optimisation – building a shared service model based on virtualisation. After looking at the various technologies in the market that could help us in achieving our objective, we zeroed in on the BladeSystem Matrix Solution offered by HP.”

Shared service model
The implementation was done in April 2010 at Essar’s Mumbai office.  When Essar started the project they discussed about the key elements to enable a shared services model and finally decided that the infrastructure had to be:

Service-oriented: Operating IT as a collection of services rather than one overseeing a collection of equipment and a pile of code. This is a radical departure from historical IT-as-a-cost-center approach.

Shared: Often IT is created in silos; many of these are aligned with individual group within departments within companies; each LOB had its own little IT department. One silo does things this way; another does basically the same thing, but in a different way, or with a different product. A shared services approach consolidates operations, eliminating and minimising silos, and making them actively cooperate. This consolidation is a prerequisite to globally sharing resources and capabilities.

Standardised and simplifed: The sharing or consolidation theme allows for standardisation. However, systems and interfaces have to be regularised and increasingly automated, further simplifying the environment.

Agile and effective: The goal of IT’s operating at the speed of business should be able to wrangle resources, to design, build, and run the services as per business needs.

“Later we decided which resources we wanted to pool together using virtualisation. We did not stop at just server virtualisation but looked at virtualisation of all the elements across the enterprise, this included server, storage and networking.”

Specific application templates had been developed to automatically provision resources for every new business user. A catalog of published service templates was published. Using a software tool, Essar then built a self-service portal for businesses users to request for IT services on the fly.

Today the typical process for ordering a new service is described below.

Benefits of the project
Essar today addresses many different segments, each of which have been growing strongly in the last few years. The company has diversified into new areas and new business and has brought agility in their business. IT has been a key enabler to support this growth and agility in the market place.

With the shared services model, the company is now able to reduce the time taken to deploy new application infrastructure from months to minutes. This enables the group of companies to rapidly address new business opportunities and emerge stronger against competition globally.

“We are enabling continuous consolidation and virtualisation. In comparison with traditional models where capacity planning is done in advance, the solution allows us to iteratively repurpose virtualisation based on resource utilisation. This brings greater flexibility for us,” said Prabhu.

Future plans
Today Essar has selected non-critical applications on this platform. Going forward the company plans to move all their critical applications on this platform.

Also, the existing setup has been deployed in production and will be used to consolidate the physical server environment to the blade matrix platform. The company plans to replicate the success of the implementation so that all new infrastructure deployments will be planned on shared services infrastructure.

JAYANTHA PRABHU, Head IT, Infrastructure and Technology, Essar Group has moved from a segregated infrastructure model to a consolidated infrastructure model.