INDUSTRYFinancial services

LOCATIONIndia

KEY CHALLENGES • Ensure IT support for rapid

business growth

• Minimize costs to maintain the viability of its business model

• Deliver new services rapidly to customers and staff

SOLUTION VMware vSphere Enterprise and VMware vSphere for Operations Management enables Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society to continue its mission of helping improve the social and financial status of members through savings.

BUSINESS BENEFITS • Virtual platform rapidly

scales IT to the needs of the business

• The company cuts hardware expenditure by 70 percent with virtualized platform

• IT team can deliver new services to the business 70 percent faster

• Platform handles 20 percent more simultaneous transactions

VMWARE CASE STUDY

Customer Profile

Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society launched in 1999 and has 800 branches across India. The company holds deposits totalling 3,685.41 crore in Indian Rupees (INR) and has made loans to the value of 3,816.99 crore INR, as of March, 2014. Headquartered in Rajasthan – India’s largest state, with its complete IT operations based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the majority of its customers live in rural areas.

Finance is an extraordinarily effective tool in spreading economic opportunity and fighting poverty says the World Bank. A financial instrument for saving is one of the best ways to escape poverty and overcome bad fortune. Yet the World Bank also says more needs to be done, since it estimates half the world’s population is still without an account.

Despite the figures, there are signs the situation is improving. In India, Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society – which has more than one million members - is successfully extending financial services to low income, rural areas where penetration has traditionally been poor. In the last three years, the company has seen substantial growth among its target audience. In that time, branch locations have increased by 433 percent – with the company recently opening its 800th branch office.

As well as branches, the number of services is increasing too. Many of these services are delivered by teams of financial advisors working in the rural communities. Their support is crucial, given that many members live in places without easy access to a branch. They collect deposits, discuss loans and offer real-time money transfers – and their work accounts for up to 90 percent of all customer interactions.

Tackling rural poverty by encouraging the habit of saving

The company is growing but still, it has no doubts of the challenges ahead, namely maintaining good governance and resource management while adapting to possible regulation changes. To help maintain governance and resource control, the company has made wise investments in its IT. Stakeholders saw early on that expansion was leading to a corresponding increase in the IT platform.

Mr Himanshu Shah, Chief Technology Officer at Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society, says, “We went through a phase of adding servers without any strategic planning. We were running around 25 physical servers at our primary datacentre and around the same number at our secondary site.”

The company’s IBM-based blade servers ran a core transaction system. Furthermore, the infrastructure featured SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) modules including Personnel Management, Organization Management, Time Management and Payroll. Added to this, the servers, backed by IBM storage and Cisco switches, also delivered a Microsoft Exchange environment. Mr Shah says, “The list of solutions was getting longer and the server platform was getting bigger. We needed to take action because of the cost. We operate with small margins so it is vital to keep down expense as much as possible.”

The company looked to virtualize its server platform and reviewed virtualization solutions from leading providers, including VMware. A local IT partner TM Systems helped launch a proof of concept (POC) to assess the different technologies. “From the results of the POC, we saw that we could continue growing the business with VMware without having to invest in more physical hardware,” says Mr Shah.

To help people on low-incomes enhance their social and financial wellbeing, financial services provider leverages technology to drive the take-up of savings accounts in rural parts of India

“We could run more virtual machines on our physical servers with VMware compared to the competition. From a cost perspective, it was clear that VMware was the best option.”

From this point, Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society began a relationship with VMware, which has evolved over recent years. Starting with VMware vSphere Standard, the company has upgraded to VMware vSphere Enterprise, with VMware vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) running alongside for performance monitoring and capacity control. “Around 80 percent of our servers are now virtualized and we expect that figure to rise to close to 100 percent when the time comes to replace our legacy systems,” comments Mr Shah. “This journey from evaluation to successful execution has been possible by unwavering involvement from the core IT team lead by Mr Ramlal Arya, Assistant Vice President, IT at Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society,” he says.

With its virtualized platform, Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society can continue to grow safe in the knowledge its low-margin business model will remain viable. The company can go on increasing its network of branch offices knowing that each office will have stable access to core systems at the primary datacentre. Plus, the company’s 3,000 employees and teams of financial advisors working out in rural communities will have peace of mind that applications are on-hand to deliver good customer service face-to-face.

“Our vision is to enhance the social and financial status of our members across India by helping them develop saving habits,” comments Mr Shah. “It is our responsibility to provide a platform for them to create savings – one that is reliable and inspires confidence. With VMware, we are achieving our goals and helping people, traditionally excluded from financial services, get access to an account.”

What’s helping drive expansion is the increased value derived from the IT platform. It means the company can offer more services to more people without having to find resources to

invest in technology. “Before we moved to VMware, server utilization was typically 20 to 25 percent,” says Mr Shah. “Today we are maximizing our utilization rates, enabling us to scale our services without adding any more servers. Take away VMware, and we would have had to buy at least five physical boxes, therefore adding to our cost base.”

He adds: “Hardware is an important cost centre for IT overall. I estimate that we have reduced hardware spend by around 70 per cent as a result of rolling out VMware vSphere Enterprise.”

By not increasing the server platform, the company has also avoided hiring more IT personnel to oversee management. Furthermore, the deployment of VMware vSOM has made administering the platform simpler for the IT team members. Through VMware vSOM, the team has a unified command console to proactively manage the VMware vSphere estate. It can keep on top of performance and availability of mission-critical applications, identifying potential issues faster and taking remedial action sooner. “We have gained dynamic control of our environment through VMware vSOM. It means we can proactively manage our estate without having to be concerned about resourcing and hiring more IT administrators,” says Mr Ramlal Arya, Assistant Vice President, IT at Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society.

Through simplified IT management, the team also has more time to work on strategic projects and enhance services. In addition, any new services can be brought to market more than 70 percent quicker because of the agility of a virtualized server platform. Mr Shah says the IT team has already used the additional time to work on enhancing the company’s mobile applications. “Mobile applications are a key area for us. We are hosting our mobile solution on our virtual machines and have already seen an increase in performance, with the system handling a 20 percent increase the number of simultaneous transactions,” he says.

“ It is our responsibility to provide a platform for them to create savings – one that is reliable and inspires confidence. With VMware, we are achieving our goals and helping people, traditionally excluded from financial services, get access to an account.”

Mr Himanshu Shah, Chief Technology Officer, Adarsh Credit Cooperative Society

VMWARE CASE STUDY

VMWARE FOOTPRINT • VMware vSphere Enterprise

• VMware vSphere for Operations Management

APPLICATIONS VIRTUALIZED • Core transaction system.• SAP HCM• SAP Mobilizer• Microsoft Exchange Server

PLATFORM• IBM blade servers• IBM storage• Cisco switches

PARTNERTM Systems

VMWARE CASE STUDY

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.comCopyright © 2014 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMwareCaseStudy_Adarsh

Looking Ahead

The IT team is focusing efforts on migrating its core transaction system to a new platform before the end of Q1, 2015, and enhancing employees’ service through the possible rollout of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). “We have stopped buying PCs for staff and now it’s just thin clients. We plan

to assess VMware Horizon View for our VDI and we are already testing VMware Site Recovery Manager to provide disaster recovery for both our VDI and our datacentre solutions,” concludes Mr Shah.

Mr. Ramlal AryaAssistant Vice President, ITAdarsh Credit Cooperative Society

Mr Himanshu ShahChief Technology OfficerAdarsh Credit Cooperative Society

02/15