Speaking Of India…

And speaking of India…per my blog post about arriving back in Bangalore over the weekend…IBM recently announced a prominent customer win here just before my arrival.

The Escorts Group, one of India’s leading engineering conglomerates, is adopting IBM’s smarter computing approach to IT which will provide enhanced performance and compliment the company’s business growth goals of lowering its overall IT operating costs.

Through its agreement with IBM, Escorts Group is going to receive a workload-optimized hardware solution to replace its existing ERP infrastructure.

The advanced systems will provide enhanced performance and the new infrastructure will reside in Escorts Group’s newly-built corporate data center. This will manage the company’s disaster recovery system in addition to the ERP system.

The IBM solution is expected to provide Escorts Group with savings in power and cooling costs of between 30 to 35 percent, over a three year period.

“Escorts Group has embarked on a journey of IT transformation to achieve operational & manufacturing excellence,” said Mr. Vipin Kumar, Group CIO, Escorts Limited. “To achieve this we are not only going beyond adhering to prevailing norms, we are in fact setting our own standards and relentlessly pursuing them to achieve our desired benchmarks of excellence.”

“To aid us in this journey we needed a scalable and high-performing IT infrastructure, backed by a robust technology roadmap,” continued Mr. Kumar.  “IBM clearly had the best solution, while ensuring a reduction in our energy footprint and increasing return on investment.”

During the hardware evaluation process to support the expansion, Escorts considered various options including Itanium-based servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp.’s Exadata Database Machine.

The company, however, chose to replace its existing HP PA-RISC servers with IBM Power 750 Express and IBM Power 740 Express systems. Each of the systems is complemented by IBM System Storage DS5000s, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about IBM’s Power 750 Express system, or here if you’d like to view the demo.