Project Log

Naukri scales new heights with RHEL

The Red Hat server implementation helped Naukri.com’s teams collaborate more closely and also strengthened its customer relationships. Vibhore Sharma, Senior VP, (Technology & IT Infrastructure) of Naukri.com shares insights from the project with Mohd Shariff PA

Naukri.com is a popular job portal where employers, placement agencies, and job seekers can exchange information. A one-stop information-clearing house about jobs and careers for Indians, Naukri has over a thousand people working at its 45 offices across 30 Indian cities and an overseas office in Dubai. It allows users to advertise and search for jobs, browse through resumes, and visit Indian and international career sites. Here Naukri has long availed of the benefits of open source software. The site has been able to extend customer engagement channels with the help of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Being in this business environment had its advantages but it also meant that the company had to overcome a number of business hurdles. “We had to keep pace with the fast-paced growth of the Internet, the steps by recruiters, and companies to move the process of recruitment online and the emergence of other job portals,” said Vibhore Sharma, Senior VP, (Technology & IT Infrastructure). This meant that apart from concentrating on and sharpening its core competencies, Naukri.com had to constantly innovate to capitalize on the huge growth opportunities presented by the booming Indian economy and offer a unique set of services to customers as well as differentiate itself from other competitors.

To build a secure, reliable, and cost-effective platform to enable the smooth functioning of the information-heavy Web site was one of the challenges. “Once the challenges around business growth and the need to have a Web site were identified, a reliable and robust technology platform became imperative. For us the key was also to ensure that the TCO for any technology option chosen can be realized,” added Sharma. At the same time, the company focused on innovating and rolling out new products and services to a large base of users.

The use and adoption of technology at Naukri has been a story of evolution, based around the growth stages of Naukri itself, including the current usage of Web 2.0 technologies. As early advocates of open-source technology, it felt that it was perhaps the best option available to enabling the company to meet its challenges effectively. The cost benefits obtained were also another important consideration. Further, Red Hat was the only server OS at that point of time supporting Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology.

A solution that scaled

The greatest challenge for any organization is to roll out new products and services in the shortest possible time. With the right platform, the development time gets shorter, turnaround times are quicker, and companies can work on innovations much faster. To Naukri.com, Red Hat offered a solution, which was reliable, scalable, and cost-effective—the 3 critical attributes for the kind of business challenges that it was looking to address.

HR departments of mainstream companies and across industry verticals and business domains started relying on portals such as Naukri to augment and supplement their HR needs at regular intervals.

The economics, cost-effectiveness and, in many cases, better return on investments made it easier for recruiters and companies to look towards job portals as major recruiting ‘points’. Naukri even in its initial stages of growth, offered the right kind of services and customer-centric benefits and that really helped in gaining the confidence of all the players in the ecosystem. It changed the way that people applied for jobs. The growth and popularity of the Internet as a medium and its amenability to fulfil these kind of requirements paved the way for the fast-paced acceptance of job portals as not only an alternative but as an important medium for job listings and recruitment.

Cost was the principal factor that made Naukri believe in and opt for an open source solution for its server OS as a proprietary solution would have increased its costs substantially—forced upgrades of hardware [servers], server OS maintenance subscription fees and more. “We never deviated from the positioning of taking the lead in building up the ecosystem for employers, placement agencies and job seekers,” said Sharma.

Solution that gained

The Web site, the products and services that Naukri sells to clients run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Naukri also had to manage the transition from a small to a medium and then a large scale operational set-up. With the job market booming, it was all about managing and maintaining the massive traffic share and higher transactions, to boot. To wit, some 10,000 resumes were being added daily from about 1,000 resumes at the start of the millennium. This tremendous surge in customer interactions meant that the Web site had to be capable of handling peak periods with downtimes kept at a bare minimum.

Naukri has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon Servers. These deployments have enabled the company to improve customer loyalty, increase cost savings, and also enabled faster rollout of products and services.

The information-heavy Web site is available to users and can be scaled up to all future needs. “We have been able to handle large databases without any problem and targeted and relevant searches are a given thing. Clients feel that there is better targeting of potential and future employees. Qualitatively, Red Hat is a recognized brand and is the flavour of Linux that has worked well for us. The cost savings have been significant due to our early adoption of open source. We’ve been able to roll out services and products much faster in line with our innovation credo,” concluded Sharma.

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com