Peer to Peer

Messaging for an online trading concern

Online trading isn’t for the faint of heart. Geojit wanted a mailing solution that would add to its operational effectiveness and daily operations. It chose a custom built solution and plans to set up a disaster recovery site at Mumbai. By Dominic K

Geojit Financial Services Ltd. (GFSL) largely known as Geojit is a charter member of the Financial Planning Standards Board of India and is one of the largest Depository Participant (DP) brokers in the country. Being one of the largest DPs comes with its own set of challenges, pros and cons.

A member of NSE and BSE, it has a network of 400 branches in India and abroad that render equity trading services. Along with a strong offline presence, Geojit also provides automated online trading services. The online trading services for end users are facilitated through five bank gateways—Federal Bank, HDFC Bank, UTI Bank, ICICI Bank and Citibank—that facilitate fund transfer and payments.

Spam attack

Being in the online financial trading business, Geojit depends heavily on e-mail which offers it a quick and formal means of communication. The company began receiving spam, which contributed to over 60 percent of its mail. This affected productivity and operational efficiency, leading to bandwidth clogging, heavy server utilisation and delay in receipt of e-mail. To make things worse, the deployed products and solutions lacked features such as group quota and e-mail restrictions.

Managing the server was not easy as the GUI was complex. A. Balakrishnan, Chief Technology Officer, Geojit says, “We wanted total control on spam, a user friendly Web-based interface for end-users and administrators as well as MIS reports regarding usage.”

Time for a change

To alleviate these issues and enhance operational productivity, Geojit opted for a solution from Netcore. Balakrishnan says, “Before migrating to Netcore’s solution, we were using a solution from Sify. This was initially deployed on a Windows platform and later migrated to a Linux platform based on Qmail. The deployment execution date for the Netcore solution was set for 2nd February 2007. The migration went through without any glitches.”

S Balaji, Head - Implementation & Customer Support, Netcore says “The pre-installation information was promptly made available to us by Geojit. This helped us chalk out a migration and deployment plan and smoothen the implementation process.”

In order to deliver services to its retail customer base of more than 5,00,000 accounts, Geojit has a network of branches, Internet Trading systems and Tele trading centres. The branch network covers cities, suburbs small and mid-sized towns.

The Geojit enterprise network architecture is set up on a hub and spoke model that supports makes it easier for the IT team to administer and manage the infrastructure. The hybrid network consists of VSATs, MPLS, leased lines and ISDN lines from multiple service providers.

The clearing and settlement system, risk management and depository systems are managed centrally. In order to maintain uptime and availability the organisation has built redundancy in all critical hardware components including the deployed database and application clusters. Almost all the IT architecture and deployment mechanisms complement the need to accommodate increasing online concurrent sessions and end user traffic.

Balakrishnan says, “Netcore implemented our messaging solution at the IDC where all the mailboxes for roaming users are created. We also decided to deploy our Linux based mail server at the Cochin office which downloads e-mail from the IDC server for the users based at Cochin.”

Online processes

Geojit’s retail spread caters to the need of individual investors. The research desk sends out SMS alerts, market pointers, research reports, stock recommendations and customer meets are organised frequently.

The online trading system allows customers to track the markets by setting up their own market watch, receiving research tips, stock alerts, real-time charts and news.

Deployed solutions

The IT products and solutions deployed at Geojit include a Fortigate 800 in a high availability active-active mode, a Radware CT100 SSL accelerator for their online trading platform, anti-virus from Kaspersky and Emergic CleanMail for anti-spam.

Cisco 2850 and Extreme Summit 200 switches are deployed in the LAN environment while the enterprise WAN infrastructure employs Cisco 2800 series and 1721 series routers. The access lists on the routers are checked and monitored periodically.

Balakrishnan says, “Our server set up includes servers from Sun, HP, Dell and IBM for our enterprise application needs. Our online trading and enterprise database solution is from Oracle and it runs on the Sun platform. While other applications such as back office and customer care management solutions run on servers from HP and Dell with IBM servers for the call centre.”

Road map

Geojit is planning to set-up a disaster recovery centre at Mumbai. While this project is at the planning stage, Wipro Infotech has already handed in a feasibility report. The deployment is expected to be completed and commissioned by the next financial year.