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United Spirits (USL) is the Rs 4,000 crore spirits arm of the UB Group. The company has a global footprint, and has 7,500 employees across various locations. USL has a portfolio of more than 140 brands and has manufacturing and bottling units in 75 locations across the country. TK Subramanian, divisional VP, Information Systems, United Spirits, in an interaction with VOICE&DATA, talks about the telecom and IT infrastructure requirements of the company, as well as the challenges faced and future strategies. Excerpts.

How important are IT and telecom infrastructures for United Spirits?
IT and telecom have not only become the backbone for smooth day-to-day functioning of any organization but have also emerged as critical success factors, especially for a marketing-driven conglomerate such as United Spirits (USL), where availability of 'up-to-the-minute' is paramount.

The key challenge is to stay abreast of latest developments. There is also the need to identify, evaluate, invest, and implement in the right technology that will eventually enable high network uptime, speed, and availability of information at the right time to all relevant stakeholders.

Keeping this in mind, we at USL have continually spruced up the IT infrastructure over the years, and today we are in a position to service all our business requirements with minimal disruption.

On the IT front, we have consolidated everything on to the IBM iSeries server. This server takes care of all our requirements. We are probably one of the few companies to have achieved such a level of consolidation by putting 111 servers into one box.

On the network front, ours is very much a hybrid architecture with all our servers connected through MPLS (from multiple IT service providers such as BSNL, Reliance, and Sify) that provides real-time information at high speed and minimal downtime. We also have many remote locations connected through VSAT.

TK Subramanian, divisional VP, Information Systems, United Spirits

Did you then have a common IT/telecom infrastructure for all businesses? How are you managing your requirements now?
Since long, many of these businesses have been reconsolidated to focus on the spirits business through USL, which indeed is the flagship company of the UB Group. However, all our ventures had/have their own 'stand-alone' IT systems and processes. UBICS, one of our group companies, specializes in providing IT solutions and it lends need-based support to other group companies.

What is the IT/telecom infrastructure spend of your company?
With the kind of growth we have had in the past few years, our IT requirements have grown manifold and we do make sure that we cater to these requirements, whether it's bandwidth or software or hardware requirements. Tentatively, we will be spending Rs1.5 crore every year in terms of our regular requirements. However, this is only indicative, and we make sure that we have certain flexibilities woven into our scheme of things to ensure that we service all our business needs that arise from time to time.

Going forward, USL intends to be a frontrunner in leveraging the Web and mobile platform through suitable upcoming technologies, which will directly benefit us in terms of quality of services offered to our stakeholders as well as meeting up with our business objectives. Accordingly, we will be scaling up our IT spend.

What is your opinion regarding outsourcing? Please, throw some light on the outsourcing done in USL.

Yes. Outsourcing has indeed become the norm for almost all companies/industries. For us, outsourcing helps in having a better control on the overall IT infrastructure. Primarily, we have outsourced our network maintenance, server hosting and application development to external vendors.

How do you ensure that IT/telecom infrastructure investments reflect positively on financial reports?
We continuously monitor and gauge all technological evolutions before finalizing our strategies and investment plans, and such a prudent approach has fetched good results in furthering our business. The key challenge is to keep pace and cope with the rapid technological evolution, which could potentially alter the fortunes of many a company.

We also thoroughly understand that end-to-end innovation is the name of the game in a highly competitive market such as India, and we are readying ourselves, both from the technological and business perspectives, to become a tech-savvy company that will enable us to ensure “speed-to-market” for all our initiatives and products. We continuously evaluate whether a technology is relevant to us.

How do you manage network security at UB and what solutions have you deployed?
We have taken all measures to ensure our networks and information shared/disseminated across our networks are secure. We have implemented own/shared firewalls, automatic anti-virus software updates, besides having a foolproof SSL-VPN to secure our network. We have got a security policy, and even though policies are articulated and available, we need certain rules to enforce them.

From the point of view of security, we have implemented a policy to decide who can send data to the outside world and who cannot. There is also an access policy to determine who can access the data and who cannot.

What are your key network challenges? How do you address them?
High uptime (conversely, low downtime), speed, and security are the three main challenges and we tackle them by not only increasing bandwidth (at a broader level, scaling up of infrastructure) and preventive maintenance, but by outsourcing our various requirements.

We ensure that we have SLAs in place with all external vendors whom we work with. We have also virtualized most of our resources so during peak time we know the key resources that are going to be used.

Are there any upgradation plans in the pipeline?

Upgradation is a regular process. We spend about Rs 3-4 crore to upgrade our server and we are constantly looking at the network. We have state-of-the-art infrastructure, which is well equipped to cater to the entire range of communication requirements in terms of network application, security, and managed services. However, we will continue to upgrade our IT infrastructure keeping pace with the technological evolution, and our investments will be driven by our business objectives.

The demand for broadband connectivity is growing rapidly and this cannot be met effectively by the existing wireline technologies. Wireless will be the dominant delivery mode for broadband services just as wireless now dominates mobile voice services. Also, Internet and mobile penetration levels in India are now only beginning to soar and there exists a golden opportunity to tap these platforms to the benefit of our businesses.

We will be interested in adopting upcoming technologies such as WiMax as we realize the importance of 'unwiring' our business in the long run and to have the best-of-breed IT infrastructure in place.

Sandeep Budki
sandeepb@cybermedia.co.in