Customer Success Stories
Shriram Chits is the largest chit funds entity in India. The trusted household Savings & Investments service provider. The inexorable growth registered by Shriram Chits in recent years not only indicates the usefulness of this ancient instrument, but it is also a reflection of the customers’ trust in the Shriram Group. The Annual Auction Turnover of Shriram Chit Companies is touching Rs.3,000 crores.(US$ 715 million).
Shriram Chits boasts the best record for timely disbursement of funds among all Chit Funds and offers excellent customer service for a community of 22,00,000 Subscribers. Shriram Chits started operations in 1974 operates in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Puducherry (Pondicherry) and Tamil Nadu, through 465 Branch offices, employing 6,000 people and 65,000 Agents.
Using state-of-the-art technology and a transparent accounting system, Shriram Chits has transformed this 3,000 year old instrument into an attractive, contemporary alternative to the Banking System.
Problem
Shriram chits TamilNadu Pvt Ltd had approximately 130 branches at the time of this deployment. Their architecture is hub-and-spoke with the datacenter at the center and each of the branch as the spokes. Each branch is a combination of multiple services and each service had its own connectivity to the Internet or a VPN to access the centralised services. This meant that each branch had one VPN and at least one DSL connection. Where ever VPN is not available at the branch location, a Wi-MAX connection is used to obtain connectivity. Hence each branch had either a VPN or Wi-MAX connection and at least one DSL connection.
Disadvantages
1. Higher cost due to more number of connections
2. Difficult to maintain at the data centre end as multiple type of networks have to be terminated and hence routing between them have to be made manually
3. More training and skilled personnel required at branch level as there is maintenance of heterogeneous network conditions and this may vary between branches
4. More IT assistants required at an organization level as they have to attend to branch problems manually
Solution
With iArmor, the network became homogenous. Each branch had just one or two DSL connections, the second connection as a back up or both used in load balance mode, which was terminated into the iArmor WAN extender. iArmor created a highly secure, accelerated channel between the branch and the data-center thereby eliminating the requirement of a VPN or a Wi-MAX connectivity. Additionally policies could be setup in iArmor so that each machine gets its fair share of bandwidth and accesses only the services it is entitled to.
Advantages
1. Homogenous network conditions. Every branch is architecturally identical as any other branch. Hence easy to maintain.
2. Single network connection in branch office (Can be from ANY ISP) making billing and maintenance a non-issue.
3. Can access any PC on any branch from any other, if the rights are appropriately given. Hence remote assistance and maintenance improved multi-fold. This has reduced the number of IT support staff required in the organization.
4. At the data-center, the network connectivity is simple, as the connectivity can be from ANY vendor and setup is simple. No complicated routing rules between the different types of network.
5. Centralized reporting informs any link breakages (even that of load balanced or standby) so, problems can be identified and solved before they become bigger.
6. 3G data card can be used as standby in case of network failure with the ISP.
Benefits for Client
1. Mean uptime at each of the 130 branches is above 99%. For the branches with 3G enabled iArmor, the uptime is 99.86%
2. IT support is centralised with 4 remote teams for emergency. This has reduced the total number of IT support staff at an organization level by more than 75%
3. Mean time to support when something goes wrong in a branch has reduced drastically, as experts from central location assist branch people remotely.
4. Total WAN expenditure at an organizational level has reduced by almost 72%.