International Business Machines Corp. : India’s Manikchand Group Makes Room for Growth with IBM Smarter Computing

) today announced that the Manikchand Group Inc., a privately-owned conglomerate that makes everything from tobacco products to wind farm equipment, has consolidated its entire IT infrastructure on IBM BladeCenter systems. The move, which displaced existing server systems from Hewlett-Packard, was designed to help the company, which operates on three continents, to better manage its growth by improving system management, reducing its overall system footprint, and significantly lowering IT costs.

"In all our IT investments we seek a balance between adopting the most innovative solutions and keeping our investments as pragmatic as possible," said S. J. Borawake, IT Head, Manikchand Group. 

"The IBM Smarter Computing strategy we're implementing will help in cutting down our IT power utilization by more than 60 percent by bringing the overall consumption to 2000W from 5000W and reduce capital and operational expenditure along the way," added P R Dhariwal, Managing Director, Manikchand Group. 

Since 1952 the Manikchand Group, headquartered in Pune, has been growing its diversified businesses. Part of the company's storied growth has been an exponential increase in data volumes and systems. With each new application has come a new server installation, which has led to significant sprawl across the company. Both issues have increasingly challenged the company's business outcomes. 

To deal with the strains, Manikchand decided to migrate to IBM's Smarter Computing approach to IT and its BladeCenter systems. Designed with high-powered, efficient, yet small footprint blade servers, the IBM BladeCenter system offers greater energy efficiencies and more floor space than traditional server systems. Also as part of the solution, Manikchand incorporated an IBM virtualization solution that is based on VMware's VSphere Essential 4.1, to enable faster server deployment and better application performance and manageability.  

Manikchand's entire implementation and consolidation was done with the help of IBM's Business Partner VDA Infosolutions Private Limited.  

Today, Manikchand's Pune-based management team can seamlessly connect with manufacturing plants across India for consolidation of application and infrastructure. The new IBM infrastructure has positioned Manikchand to be able to grow its IT along with its business, and to serve more clients than before in the same hardware footprint. 

For Manikchand, the new infrastructure has improved manageability of the company's core business processes and resulted in significant energy cost savings. Overall, Manikchand estimates savings up to 30 percent in overall IT costs. In addition, since the company is utilizing only half of the actual server capacity, it is confident that future scalability will be accomplished at a minimal cost.  

"Manikchand Group realized the need to build a robust infrastructure to address their current and future expansion plans, attaining a lower TCO and a higher ROI. Our Business Partner helped them identify the right solution by factoring all future growth plans of the Group. The choice of IBM over competitive platforms reaffirms our leadership in the server market in India and our commitment to help clients and Business Partners succeed," said Anoop Nambiar, Country Manager, Business Partner Organization, IBM India.