BPTP To Roll Out Wi-Fi Connectivity For All Ongoing Projects

Delhi-based real estate player BPTP is an upcoming company in the transformational real estate space. Vilakshan Jakhu, director – IT, BPTP, spoke to Biztech2.0 about the company’s strategy to roll out Wi-Fi, integrate SAP with customer portals and deploy cameras on construction sites etc.

What is BPTP’s strategy for rolling out Wi-Fi for ongoing projects?

Currently, BPTP is rolling out Wi-Fi connectivity for all its ongoing projects viz. IT complexes and SEZs. We may also go in for Wi-Fi enabled townships; however, RoI in such a project would be low so currently there are attempts to engage external agents who can do the billing directly.

From a security perspective, the regular WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption can be easily hacked by downloadable tools. The Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA 2) certificate-based encryption is considered more secure than WEP, which is also used for all our Wi-Fi zones at IT complexes and SEZs. It is encrypted directly with our certificate server.

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How are you going forward with the SAP implementation?

The core SAP ERP implementation was completed in Phase I. this will be followed by Phase II and III, which includes the CRM integration allowing the customers to interact with the company with regards to the various construction sites i.e. if any changes need to be made in the plots, flats etc. The CRM will also be used for lead tracking, which will be accessible on the Blackberry, thus resulting in a high-tech system.

We are also planning to develop a customer portal to facilitate services like online payments and checking property details, instalment information, interest liabilities etc.

Developing a broker portal is also in the pipeline to help BPTP’s brokers address customer needs efficiently and track leads.

Can you discuss the initiative to integrate SAP with the website and subsequently with ‘Estate Master’?

The primary upcoming initiative revolves around integrating SAP with the customer portal and the CRM implementation. Business warehouse, the BI tool of SAP is currently under deployment. We might go for a BI tool after a couple of years on the basis of the legacy data available.

The company is considering some PoCs (Proof of Concepts) for ‘Estate Master’, a real-estate specific product used by popular real estate players. Estate Master would be integrated with SAP, thus eliminating the need for separate data storage for the product.

How does the ‘camera deployment for remote site monitoring’ help?

We did a pilot project at one of our sites where the camera was mounted on a 25-meter pole coupled with the complete backbone as legally permissible to record the 24X7 feed and directly keep a tab from the project office. This enabled us to monitor the daily operations at the project site like the movement of trucks during unloading of inventory, productivity of employees at the site etc.

The monitoring is not done on a religious basis; the project-in-charge also has access to the live feed and monitors it regularly. The corporate level monitoring is done from time to time.

What is BPTP’s hardware footprint?

We have already virtualised 26 servers for SAP and other applications. We will gradually move from the ‘one PC one server model’. We are considering a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) deployment so that thin clients can be used; however, the primary concern is storage.

We have a single data centre and the DR plan is soon coming up. For storage, the SAN (Storage Area Network) is used whereas blade servers are also in place. We are on a Gigabyte platform on Dell so there is a standardised IT infrastructure with no homogeneity. The patches and the daily application deployment can be done remotely and it is monitored automatically with the help of the LCS (Live Communications Server).

What is the Information Security scenario at BPTP like?

We use SAP, which is fairly secure after proper management of the systems. There is multiple penetration testing done for various security scenarios. BPTP uses an IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) instead of the traditional Cisco-based IDS (Intrusion Detection System). As a result, the worms are prevented even before they enter the firewall followed by specific e-mail management and thus, we have never had a virus outbreak or any mention in the spam list.