Marico is an Indian group engaged in consumer products and services in the beauty and wellness space. Some well known brands like Parachute, Saffola, Sweekar, Nihar, Hair and Care are being marketed by Marico. The company acquires significant share in the coconut oil, hair oil, edible oil and other beauty products.

UC for Instant Growth
Being a fast growing company with a vast network, Marico wanted to enable better communication and collaboration among its employees. The company wanted to reduce their cost on traveling of their employees for meetings and reviews. Also, most of the services available to the company's employees were hosted, hence with the pay-per-use model, cost was a major constraint.

Marico Weds Microsoft
Marico, initially considered using several messaging environments such as Skype, Gtalk, and Yahoo Messenger, but all this was not enough to satisfy the exact requirement. Finally, Marico zerod in on the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 for presence, instant messaging, and web-conferencing.

The aim of the solution was to get an enterprise wide communication and collaboration platform, group instant messaging, support for multi-party communication and archival of communication. The project consisted of three phases-solution architecture, testing and roll out. The whole process took around one month to get it started.

The OCS server was implemented in the data center at the main office at Rang Sharda at Bandra Reclamation. Chat, presence awareness, and audio and video conferencing were the modules implemented.

Honeymoon Period
It has just been a few months since the solution was implemented. "The new solution provides Marico with a competitive advantage by providing messaging tools that enable communication across multiple vendors/partners/offices and locations," says Girish Rao. The range of communications options provided by Office Communications Server2007, will give the mobile work force at Marico, a powerful new tool to make their time on the road more productive. The solution is also helping them in better information sharing among employees through different modes of communication. "Improved collaboration will help our employees to stay informed, and foster new ideas," says Rao. Also, by using this solution, Marico has reduced travel costs for its engineers and IT personnel. They can use Presence to find out who might be available to help and make contact with that person instantly.