Peer to Peer

Smooth operations

Struggling with insufficient bandwidth and poor application performance, Kotak Securities enhanced its business operations by switching to Citrix Presentation Server. By Tanu Talwar

In the brokerage industry speed, efficiency, accuracy and prompt customer service are key performance metrics. Any delay in accessing financial information or recording transactions can be disastrous resulting in a huge blow to a company’s business and reputation. The nature of the industry demands that it be equipped and armed with the best possible resources and tools available in the field of information technology to guarantee apt and timely information to its customers.

Kotak securities, is a leading brokerage house headquartered in Maharashtra. With more than 200 branches running across the country serving over 2,20,000 customers, the company found the going difficult due to the inefficient and cumbersome IT infrastructure that it had in place. The company has two main offices in Mumbai, one at Nariman Point and the other at Fort. With the central server residing at its Nariman Point office, the branch was continuously pumped with information flowing in from the company’s numerous divisions. Connected via leased lines the company was running applications such as Pervasive SQL, Tally and Microsoft Exchange. The leased line set up, besides being complicated, necessitated huge bandwidth to transfer data from one location to another. Moreover, sending information over leased lines resulted in choking nearly 99 percent of the company’s bandwidth. Due to this the network was unable to guarantee prompt and timely access to all applications to the company’s branches resulting in a slow and poor information flow.

Struggling to keep up

Swapnil R Patil, Manager- Information Technology, Kotak Securities, says, “The earlier client-server architecture was proving to be quite cumbersome when it came to accessing data. Due to insufficient bandwidth, employees were not receiving information in a timely manner.” From a business standpoint, if a particular application was not available and data entry was not conducted at a particular time, then all the chain-linked activities were affected and the entire business cycle was delayed. Then again, the company faced hurdles, which could not be ignored. “Our back-office staff at the Fort and other locations, as well as the auditors during the financial year closing, had problems accessing data from the Nariman Point office, where the servers resided,” explains Patil. Moreover, insufficient bandwidth made accessing data at remote locations a strenuous task. This in turn caused the documents to be transferred manually from one location to the other, wasting valuable time.

The company’s entire back end processing was being carried out at Mumbai. However, poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth often resulted in slow and delayed generation of the management information system report. The MIS report generation typically took four hours as printing documents and over 300 contracts used to slow down the printing process at the Fort office. Furthermore, with no centralised IT administration, the company had to incur huge cost besides spending time and effort on upgrading to the latest applications across its network. Patil says, “Prior to the implementation, we were required to deploy software on all our local servers and devices in order to upgrade to any new application. This operation consumed immense time and resources. It took us over three to four days to upgrade any function.”

Wanted: A centralised platform

With offices scattered across the country, Kotak Securities required a system that could seamlessly integrate its various offices by providing a platform for centralised administration. “With all these recurring problems the situations was untenable. Looking at the scenario, we started to look for a solution that would enable us to deploy applications by providing immediate and fast access to necessary corporate information” adds Patil. In addition to improving application performance, the company was also looking at a way to reduce its bandwidth demands, as the cost of leased lines was high.

Kotak Securities went in search of a solution. At the time, the company was faced with two choices, Citrix Presentation Server and Microsoft Terminal Services. Choosing Citrix Presentation Server was a no-brainer. Patil recalls, “We needed an end to end application delivery system that could offer us application virtualisation and centralisation. Then again, it had to be able to work across any network, reduce the cost of management and support, and increase data security ensuring fast and reliable performance.” A number of factors worked in favour of Citrix including the fact that the compression ratio of the solution presented by the company was more aggressive.

The implementation

Once decided, the solution was implemented by Genesis Software, over a period of one week at the company’s Mumbai branches. A two-member team from Genesis Software worked closely with the IT team at Kotak Securities to update the system and provide comprehensive training. After completing the implementation at its Mumbai office, a 15 member in-house team went ahead and replicated the solution across the company’s branches, implementing the solution in a span of three to four months. During this period, the team was faced with the following challenges: -

• Overcoming inhibitions: One of the major challenges encountered by the team was to gain approval from the management to go ahead with the implementation on such a large scale. Patil states, “The challenge was to convince people that the solution would work and would prove to be effective.”
• Availability of quality master data: Having numerous branches spread across the country, the team had to collate as much data as possible to ensure that in the future these processes would prove to be effective and timely.

The team tackled these challenges through training and workshops. In order to overcome the initial apprehensions expressed, the team deployed a parallel testing phase and analysed the validity of the solution for a period of two months at its Mumbai branch before going live nationwide.

Reaping the benefits

Kotak Securities got its first ROI immediately after the deployment since it was able to centralise IT administration and support which turned out to be a panacea for numerous IT related administration hassles. The benefit of centralised administration equipped the company in more ways than one. For once, Kotak Securities is now able to efficiently manage and monitor its entire IT network. Furthermore, problems such as insufficient bandwidth that had bedeviled the company prior to the implementation have now been resolved and it is equipped with continuous and prompt application access. The timely recording of transactions due to faster access has resulted in faster reporting. This has further helped the company improve its customer relations by guaranteeing a quick and prompt response to queries.

Patil says, “Quite clearly, server consolidation has significantly lowered the IT hardware and administration costs. There is less complexity and physical movement of IT administration staff. Further, troubleshooting any client machine in remote locations has become simpler using session-shadowing capability.” Then again, centralised administration has further assisted the company in storage consolidation, an important event on account of the huge amount of data generated by the firm.

Additional Payoffs

• Eliminating bandwidth choking: Pre Citrix, sending data over leased lines resulted in a heavy load on the network resulting in blocking bandwidth availability. With the Citrix solution in place the company’s bandwidth usage has become minimal and functions like remote printing and creating profiles are easily managed. Patil adds, “The design of the earlier client-server model was such that it was becoming difficult to work with key applications. Also, accessing data located at remote locations was becoming a problem. All these issues have now been addressed and the operations team is able to seamlessly access all applications as and when required.”
• Significant Cost Savings: With Citrix, the time required to deploy new applications and upgrades has dropped from three days to about three hours. Meeting deadlines is no longer a problem for the firm, as it’s able to access reports in a matter of minutes as against hours earlier. In addition, to speeding up the deployment process the Citrix solution has helped in bringing down the IT costs by substantially saving on expenditure on bandwidth.