ING Life’s Open Source Initiative Reaps Big Benefits

Subramaniam realized that a substantial cost was incurred in procuring licenses for desktops at the branches. The license and software support cost for every desktop at the branch was approximately Rs 52,000 for the first three years and Rs 9,000 thereafter.  The OS platform would help them trim these costs. If they moved their desktops to Linux they would incur a cost of Rs 43,000 over six years. That would save the company Rs 43,000 on every system over six years. This came to a cost savings of Rs 7,000 on every desktop per year. With such significant savings in sight, Subramaniam was bullish about Open Source.

But, just as there's no free lunch, the implementation process was not easy. Migrating desktops to Linux was a huge challenge for the IT team at ING Life. Interoperability was another issue. There were more than 2,000 desktops and 5,000 users across more than 250 locations to be migrated in a limited time span. Subramaniam wanted to ensure that migration was end-user friendly. "We had three separate teams (migration team, training team and support team) to support users and handle the different queries and calls during this project," he says.

Once ING Life successfully tackled the challenges, the project went live in two phases. In the first phase, about 1,100 desktops were progressively moved across over 70 locations. In the second phase, over 900 desktops were migrated at over a 100 locations. With the deployment of OS, the organization saved about Rs 10,000 per year (for the first three years) for every new desktop added to the enterprise. "Now we can establish cost efficient sales and service centers countrywide," says Subramaniam.

The Person Behind It

Ravishankar Subramaniam, Director-IT

ING Life

“Now we can establish cost efficient sales and service centers across the country.”