Connecting IMI...For Future Too

Nestled in Qutab
Institutional Area, International Management Institute (IMI), New
Delhi was established in 1981 in collaboration with IMI Geneva (now
IMD, Lausanne). IMI is India's first corporate sponsored business
school with sponsorship from corporate houses like RPG Enterprises,
Nestle, ITC, SAIL, Tata Chemicals, BOC and Williamson Magor and other
prominent enterprises. Over a period of 28 years, the Institute has
claimed to have acquired global status, receiving UNDP assistance for
promoting internationally oriented management education. Besides
this, it has also various other international linkage with bodies
like World Bank, UNDP, ILO, UNCTAD, Asian Productivity Organization
and others.

Besides its location at
the capital of India, IMI has also come up with a facility in Kolkata
and will be shortly launching its premier session this CY in
Bhubaneswar. Coming up with an entirely new campus in the capital of
Orissa, the IT infrastructure of the institute needed a fresh start
with IMI, floating multiple tenders for solutions and supply of its
IT equipments.

In June, 2010, the
institute floated a network laying tender for the new campus
requiring a holistic passive component structure in place. Speaking
over the
networking needs, Dinesh Sharma, manager-systems, IMI said,
“Network is the backbone to any set-up, either intranet or Internet
and this accounts for the major set-up plan for the new
establishment.”

The tender was bagged by
Kolkata-based Epitome Convergent Networks (ECN), a new company born
last year to lay the complete cabling needs of IMI. Spread across
nearly 2 km
across 6 blocks, the cabling solution is valued at Rs 30 lakh for the
passive components alone.

Speaking over the present
deployment, Rajarshi Ghosh of ECN said, “There are a few positive
factors when considering a new deployment. First of all, as there is
no current set-up, it gives us the much needed liberty to modify and
customize the solution according to the needs to make the customer
happy. In the second place, the laying part can be done at ease as
there is not much hassle in the overlay part.”

Shortly after bagging the
contract, ECN rushed a team of 4 members to deploy the cables using
UDP CAT 6.0 and CAT 5e product line. “The primary need for us
was to have a good and effective set-up to provide seamless voice and
data transfers across all blocks and platforms. Hence, we preferred
to use CAT 6.0 and 5e layout,” Sharma added.

However, realizing the
needs of IMI, ECN outsourced the laying manpower procurement and
functions to Kolkata-based Akash Udyog which again sent a team of 12
personnel to manually lay the cables. “ECN was focused over
providing the solution, testing and analyzing the deployment. We have
a balanced manpower in our company, out of which most are technical
personnel in testing, support and solutions. Hence, we were left with
a few ground engineers. As a natural alternative, we thought it would
be best to outsource to Akash Udyog.”

Speaking over its
preference for ECN to deploy passive components in the networking
project, Sharma added, “ECN is well known in the eastern region and
has an able team of technical personnel. Also, with their proposal
meeting, our criteria and their product line, we preferred to give
the contract to ECN.”

The entire cabling
deployment is done using products from Tyco Electronics (TE). ECN
used a mix of TE products to offer the solution to IMI encompassing
fiber optics, CAT and assemblies. With performance featuring
on top of the customer wish-list, ECN focused on using SPEC 44 wires
which are dual wall constructed radiation cross-linked polyalkene
with the mechanical and chemical properties of radiation cross-linked
polyvinylidene fluoride (PVF2). Also, the range of SPEC 55 wire is
insulated with modified radiation cross-linked ETFE polymer.

Further, the Tyco UTP CAT
6 cables is said to be exceeding the proposed TIA requirements for
Category 6 performance. They comply with all of the performance
requirements for current and proposed applications such as Gigabit
Ethernet, 100BaseTX, token ring, 155 Mbps ATM, 100 Mbps TP-PMD, ISDN,
analog (broadband, base-band) and digital video and voice.

Although the project is
still ongoing and is expected to be completed by mid-April, the
present state of deployment is already delighting the customer.
Further, IMI is now planning to go for Wi-Fi network and is
considering video surveillance and CCTV implementation also. “We are
very satisfied
with the present state of the affairs in the upcoming campus
(Bhubaneswar). ECN is doing a wonderful job and its deployment team
is excellent in terms of understanding technology and offering
flexible solutions at crucial hours. With the network testing and
slither expected to be over by mid-April, we may go for Wi-Fi
depending on the working bandwidth available,” Sharma concluded.