Reader ROI
Executive Summary
CIO 100 Winner: With an inflexible IT infrastructure and crowded data centre, ITC was struggling.But Partha Sengupta knew a away out. By virtualizing his infrastructure he avoided expenses on multiple fronts with the potential to save about Rs 14 crore over the next five years.
One of India's foremost private sector companies with a turnover of Rs 15,000 crore, ITC has a diversified presence in cigarettes, hotels, paperboards and specialty papers, agri-business, packaged foods, IT, personal care, and other FMCG products.
Case Study Highlights
It's a massive business and it wasn't slowing down. But as IT did its best to keep up, the pressure was beginning to show. "On an average, 44 processors of computing capacity was needed by the business to host applications or enhance the performance of existing applications," says Partha Sengupta, CIO and head-IT Shared Services, ITC. "The sizing of this requirement was done by application vendors, who tend to keep buffers at every level, resulting in 50 to 90 percent under-utilization of resources."
All that fat began affecting the heart of ITC's operations: its datacenter. It had 650 racks and it was so crowded there wasn't enough space for new provisions. It was also pushing the datacenter's cooling and power capacities to their limits.
Sengupta decided to meet these challenges with one elegant solution: virtualization. The technology had the added benefit of creating a more centralized, flexible IT infrastructure. To start, he assessed the utilization levels of existing servers. Those with the least usage were virtualized.
The virtualization license and additional storage cost him just under Rs 30 lakh. But the project, which went live in January 2008, saved ITC Rs 38.08 lakh in its first year. And it will create opex savings of Rs 12.77 lakh from the second year onwards.
In the immediate, it freed up costly datacenter space and the power and cooling needed to run 44 processors. Just the cost of running those processors (without accounting for cooling expenses) will reduce annual power consumption by 72,270 KW.
Beyond the numbers, the project cut the cycle of negotiation-approval-procurement that bogged down IT's ability to deliver. "Now we have minimum waiting time for IT infrastructure deployments, ensuring savings in project timelines and application development costs, and guaranteeing faster time-to-market," says Sengupta. "This is huge business benefit."
Last but not the least, it opened the doors for further virtualization. According to Sengupta, this project has the potential to generate cost savings in the range of Rs 14 crore over next five years.
The Person Behind It
“Beyond the obvious savings, it's shrunk IT infrastructure deployment time.”
Other Virtualization Case Studies
Raheja Group Simplifies a Tricky Virtualization Project
A case study on Virtualization in HospitalityVirtualization is the mother of all tricky projects after ERP, feel some CIOs. Here’s the story of a CIO who took a rather bold step and won.
- Fidelity's Gamble With Server Virtualisation Pays Off
- Glenmark Generics Learnt From Its Mistake of Rushing Towards Virtualization
- Polaris Software Labs Leverages VDI to Curb Travel and Training Costs
- Virtualization Helped Viteos Increase Resource Utilization
- How A CIO Increased His Project Budget By 50 Percent
Other FMCG Case Studies
Marico Aligns Expenses to Budget Allocation with Financial Planning Software
A case study on Business Intelligence & Analytics in FMCGHow the manufacturers of Parachute, among the world's largest coconut oil brands, ensured that their monthly expenses fell in perfectly with their yearly budget allocations.



