Established in 1916, JM Baxi & Co, is a shipping services company with 31 locations across the country. The organization has a strong presence in most of its business lines and leadership in several of the shipping support services. As the company grew, each individual business thought of moving onto a website. Earlier, they had websites created and spread across different vendors. There was no approach to look at the right platform for those websites.
Despite of having large number of partners for hosting, many of them were on shared hosted platform. From a security point of view, when it came to customer data there were concerns around security. Prasad Patil, CTO, JM Baxi says, “Firstly, we decided to consolidate all of them onto a single platform on the cloud and have a dedicated slice for us, where we will have the control of the security aspects of that particular installation with the firewall routes etc. From a discreet, spread-out environment which was there we moved onto consolidation on ESDS cloud.”
Cloud not just for cost savings
The move to ESDS’ literal pay-as-you-go model was a major boost in selecting it. Most of the organization’s websites are B2B or B2E, which don’t touch customer base like a retail company would do. The amount of hits on the website is quite less. While the install would take a certain amount of compute, the daily utilization is quite less. The pay as you consume model actually helps JM Baxi to optimize cost. Talking about other benefits Patil mentions, “Having them on a single platform I can monitor them centrally for the entire group. The managing cost and the effort going into each group looking into it individually has come down because of it.” Going further, there will be a resource looking at development of these websites. Traditionally, every development would have an external partner with a certain amount of money. Now, this resource will do development centrally as a service for the group.
Since there is a dedicated slice on the cloud, the time to delivery for the website has become very quick. Earlier, every website of individual group would be done with service provider of his choice and liking. Now with the slice already there, it take a day or two for the website to be created. One of the aspects of choosing the cloud partner was the simplicity by which the team could manage it. There was no training required, and the only feature taught was how to create hosting and how to manage the resources. There was no additional cost on scaling the team. This has also empowered the team by learning a new set of skills.
Absence of a solution or platform was one of the reasons for various companies to look for options that they did. The lacunae was that there was no central platform to avail of. “We have fixed that so they can focus on core business and not be shadow IT. There was no change in terms of changing business processes. Once we consolidate from a platform perspective, the standardization will come in,” explains Patil.
Cloud is not for cloud’s sake at JM Baxi. Says Patil, “As we are embarking on digital transformation drive across the group, cloud is the first step and foundation for it.” The organization also has a central platform for it i.e. PHP/MySQL. Also, the resource for PHP/MySQL are very easily available. The organization is also looking at integrating WordPress features due to ready-made templates and quick integration with social media.
The main priority is to ensure that the websites created should be responsive in nature. Patil emphasizes, “By doing this consolidation we are giving out a message to our businesses which says that we have this for you to drive your web initiatives. They have now ability to think only of business and take up new initiatives as they don’t have to worry about the platform part.”
Initially, the organization has targeted 8 websites. There are smaller group companies which also have their websites which we will be brought on this platform. Laying down the importance of web presence Patil says, “The scale is not of a retailer, but it is very important for us because whoever is visiting the website is giving us business, which is huge amount. There could only be ten customers but they do huge transactions.” For websites ESDS will be their primary cloud partner. The organization is also working with Amazon and Netmagic for other initiatives like DR or DC in the cloud.
Cost saving is often touted as a primary for cloud adoption. Patil disagrees to this saying, “Cloud should not primarily be for cost savings. It should be for business outcomes. Example, speed for access, user experience, security of transaction were our main motivators to go on cloud.”
Giving an example within the organization he says, “One of our offices in Pune where local connectivity is an issue, primary application on cloud is a better option. Customers have frequent disruptions. On cloud they have a very good experience. Over a period of time people have in-house developed applications. Ability of a worker of having a whole of tools to do testing of the code , capabilities, security for a couple of sets of applications on-premise will be very less as compared to put it on the cloud and using it as a service. He says that sometimes cost could of cloud could be the same as in-house set-up, but manageability, efficiency, customer experience are very important which cloud delivers.
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