Best Deployment-Runner-up Wizer Technologies

Kolkata-based
Wizer Technologies won the esteemed award for 'Best Deployment' for the tax
collection project that it executed for the Kolkata Municipal

Corporation (KMC), valued at Rs 2.7 crore. The KMC has got over
5,00,000 taxpayers and it was using the historical data which was available
on hard copy to calculate current tax. After the project, it have migrated all
data to a DB2 database and calculates the current property tax by using
historical data. 

A public services company for the metro, the KMC had a distributed and
isolated IT wing which was doing some basic automation work on tax collection,
death, birth and disease-related activities on Oracle and SCO Unix on an
Intel platform using Compaq servers. It got a $220 million grant from the
Department for International Development for infrastructure creation for
drinking water capacity, distribution of resources and GIS.

To manage this project it hired KPMG as its lead consultant and TCS as its IT
consultant to advise on the IT capacity building. Some other consultants were
also hired for GIS monitoring and HR.

Wizer initiated the account mapping over a year ago wherein it understood
that the first job was to translate the customers short term and medium term
need into an IT road map and present it to them. The presentation comprised of
how as an IBM partner it could provide a single point of ownership not only for
KMC's basic hardware supply but also for the database and application
software, which would negate interaction with multiple vendors and multiple
points of failure.

Wizer was awarded the first contract as a pilot last year for one of the tax
collection units to deploy and translate the salesman's commitment to reality.
The pilot used IBM X255 servers, IBM fiber storage, Linux Enterprise, DB2
software and related additional hardware.

The tax collection application software was developed on DB2 for which Wizer
took the help of an IBM certified software developer. This software is currently
being deployed and is under test run. The entire SRS was created within two
months and Wizer has an extended team of six people working on it.

The biggest challenge in the project was to change the user mindset from
Oracle to DB2, since all the MIS personnel were using Oracle for the almost a
decade. Initially, Wizer had to face some resistance, but finally the users
realized the features of the application and became conversant in its usage.

After the first phase was partly deployed, KMC contemplated automating all
the other aspects of collections and various other utilities that they wanted to
automate. The objective was to eventually consolidate the entire application on
a mainframe of a cluster of RISC servers. It offered Wizer another contract for
Rs 2.5 crore last month and the solution provider is in the process of deploying
the same across three branches and a head office. The hardware deployed was IBM
x255 servers, fiber storage, LTO, PCs and software applications.