Office 365 cuts down 30% costs for Visaka Industries

Visaka Industries was already on a look out for a compelling cloud solution that could integrate well with their existing IT infrastructure

In a move to enhance business productivity and keep place with the growth plans, Visaka Industries recently deployed Microsoft Office 365 across its India offices preferring the cloud based application platform over Google Apps.

Visaka Industries was established in 1981 to manufacture corrugated cement fiber sheets. With the initial production capacity of of 36,000 tons per year, the first factory in Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh commenced the commercial production of the cement sheets in 1985. The company diversified into textile yarn manufacturing in 1992 and took the unknown Airjet spinning technology as a challenge & successfully established the factory in Nagpur to produce about 2000 tons of man-made fibre yarns per annum.

With focus on growth plan, the company has now grown to the position of second largest cement sheet manufacturer in India. Visaka has installed 7 factories spread across the country, producing about 650,000 tons of corrugated cement sheets per year.

The spinning plant, with 28 MURATA Twinjet spinning machines, is the world's largest installation of its kind, producing about 9,000 tons of yarns per annum.

The non-asbestos fiber board and panel division was established in the year 2009 to cater to the needs of modern construction designs. This division has a capacity of producing 30,000 tons of sheets per year.

Visaka's turnover has touched `600 crores during the financial year 2008-09.

Visaka Industries has been steadily growing over the years and so were its IT requirements. The profound requirement was to build the company's IT infrastructure to keep pace with its growth plans and ensure smooth communication and collaboration amongst the employees. In this process, the company faced intermittent and unpredictable issues owing to IT infrastructural bottlenecks, further leading to downtime, considerable IT overhead and productivity loss. Microsoft's productivity and collaboration solution - Office 365 aptly resolved the issues of Visaka Industries. Moreover, just when the company was about to invest in a multi-party video conference solution, they found the right solution in Microsoft Lync.

 

For the Office 365 suite, the solution offers quick setup within minutes without having to go through a lengthy installation process. Time and costs savings can be made in IT by eliminating the need to maintain and upgrade software on individual user workstations as it is accessed via a web browser. The documents and other data can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at any location or on mobile devices. The biggest advantage, however, is the ease of use as most people are already familiar with the Microsoft productivity tools. There will be no need to train employees on a new system, no compatibility problems and set-up is fast and easy. Furthermore, it offers the capability of collaboration where users can easily collaborate on documents online with changes made visible immediately, speeding up the editing process. Documents can also be shared securely without having to email them to recipients.

The main concern, however, is that as an online service Microsoft 365 requires a stable internet connection for access. There have been important outages experienced with Microsoft's current cloud-based services, which is casting a shadow over the reliability of Microsoft 365. However, this problem is also experienced by other cloud-based service providers and is not unique to Microsoft. The monthly subscription fee is also a consideration as a recurring cost that will have to be paid per employee, however this has to be weighed against current licence fees and reduced IT costs. With a pricing structure that is close to other cloud-based services, Microsoft 365 is likely to attract many small businesses and enterprises already using their desktop products.

Delighted with the new Office 365 deployment, Krishna Moorthi, president - IT, Visaka Industries stated, "The move to Office 365 has been remarkable so far as it brings cloud versions of Microsoft's familiar Office productivity solutions, enabling our employees to start using the services immediately. We were also able to switch our employees from Google Apps to Office 365 services in a short span of time, with no downtime. Microsoft Office 365 clearly out-shines Google Apps not only in ease of use but also in terms of reliability and manageability."

Visaka Industries has further growth plans on its anvil, as a result it becomes important for the business to have a unified presence with a common IT platform. The deployment of Office 365 could not have come at better time for the company where they were seeking a compelling cloud solution that could integrate well with their existing IT infrastructure and could migrate to cloud on their terms.

According to Microsoft, with the deployment of Office 365, Visaka Industries has observed multiple value additions. In the first place, it has reduced IT costs and administration. With the services and reliability of Office 365, IT staff can spend more time on business operations and less time and money on upkeep of servers and desktop infrastructure; the company anticipates 25% to 30% cost savings overall. Also, the deployment aided in avoiding employee downtime as during the transition to Office 365, IT staff reported zero support calls from employees related to communication downtime because of the familiarity of Office products and ease of use.

Ramkumar Pichai, GM, Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India, "We are confident that our technology, experience and resources will securely host Visaka Industries' critical communication and collaboration services. Microsoft's value proposition to enhance business productivity leaves Google Apps far behind."