Aegon Religare Got Great Savings With an Open Source Email Solution

Business Case: That’s a reality Aegon Religare, the 21st  entrant to the Indian life insurance sector, came face to face with. The company, which launched just under two years ago, is a joint venture between Aegon, Religare, and Bennett, Coleman & Company, and is determined not to be treated like a small player. Which is why the day it launched, it synchronized the opening of its branches in 25 locations across India. It has also hired close to 2,000 employees. As it played catch-up with its peers, it opened new branches (it now has over 57), which implied a steady increase in the number of e-mail users — and corresponding maintenance costs.

Project: But even before it could make the mistake of introducing expensive e-mail infrastructure, Srinivasan Iyengar, former director-IT and change management and now the COO of Aegon Religare, stepped in. “We wanted to have an effective e-mail solution that could bring down the cost of e-mail per employee,” says Iyengar.
So he proposed implementing a Linux solution for the majority of Aegon Religare’s employees. Only about 250 of its senior executives — those who needed to stay in touch with the parent company (Religare) in Netherlands — were given access to Microsoft exchange.

The implementation resulted in impressive savings of between 40 and 50 percent. “The results are way beyond our expectations,” says Iyengar. Which is why Iyengar doesn’t see the reason more organizations don’t follow his approach given that mailboxes are a commodity. “By default you don’t expect much from a mailbox because unlike an app you don’t wonder what business value it can offer or the sort of revenue it can generate. It’s just a mail box,” he says.

First steps: The Open Source solution is also scalable. Iyengar says he has tested his system for up to 20,000 users. “And I don’t have to deal with sophisticated or high-class servers,” he says. The one challenge he says is creating an address book common to both the Linux and the MS Exchange users. His service provider got around the problem by introducing a few scripting changes to the software. They created a global address book which allowed users from one group to look into the details of the other and vice versa.  “The integration of the common address book had a few teething problems, which lasted a month. But it settled down,” says Iyengar. A repository was created that was constantly updated with new details either from the Linux or the exchange users. And what could have led to half-a-day of work every week — to manually update Linux mail boxes with exchange users — was fully automated.

Benefits: About security concerns, Iyengar says it did not concern him or his management. “Although we made use of the Linux platform which is free, the solution that we are using is proprietary.” Today, Iyengar’s management team is pleased about the project. “We are always trying to explore ways to manage costs efficiently,” says Rajeev Chugh, financial controller at Aegon Religare. “And this has been one of the significant projects that we have undertaken to cut costs.”

The Person Behind It

Srinivasan Iyengar

COO, Aegon Religare

We wanted to have an effective e-mail solution that could bring down the cost ofe-mail per employee.