In 
In the midst of a recovering business environment, companies today are swiftly realising the importance of aligning IT requirements with their core business needs. Given that organisations are no longer looking at IT as a support function, IT managers today are not hesitant to evaluate technologies that are value for money. The only catch is: it should not compromise the performance.
A year ago, Pertisth Mankotia, Head-IT at Sheela Foam was thinking on somewhat similar lines. For his company, a Rs 950-crore group and among the top five manufacturers of slab stock polyurethane foam in south-east Asia, the challenge was to reduce dependence on Unix systems, improve the cost-efficiency ratio, and simplify systems management to improve scalability for business growth.
The genesis
Founded in 1972, the firm has a number of manufacturing units in India. Also, there are more than 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers. In order to manage its operations effectively, the company ran an in-house ERP on a legacy server in a proprietary Unix environment.
The custom-built ERP was integrated into Sheela Foams distribution network. However, owing to the proprietary system, there was too much dependency on the vendor to test and implement the desired processes to improve functionalities. This was proving to be costly and time-consuming.
Moreover, the legacy system was of limited use and the IT department of the company was unable to introduce new applications for scalability. Since the ERP solution was hosted on a proprietary product, there was very little room to customise the home-grown ERP solution, elaborates Mankotia.
The problem
Prior to the migration to open source, the company was using three Rx (Itanium) series servers and a SAN storage solution. The approximate annual maintenance cost with four hours of critical support was more than Rs 65 lakh. And despite all that investment and cost, the performance was not getting any better.
And then, when on a penultimate day, the companys system went down and took more than 16 hours to recover, Mankotia decided to put his bet on an open source solution.
You can imagine my situation, when my network got down for 16 hours. And I was in no position to take any remedial action. It was really hurting the business he painfully recollects.
At the end of the day, any system downtime takes a heavy toll on the companys goodwill and customer satisfaction fronts, he remarked further. Reflecting back, he also feels that the incident came as a blessing in disguise and prompted the company to consider migrating to an open source solution that could be independently maintained by an internal IT team.
The solution
With the proprietary solution, it was difficult to try things out and innovate even if one wanted to. Things like setting up a rack and clone servers were cumbersome and costly affairs. With the open source, there is always an opportunity to add new features and manage them at a much lesser cost.
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