MindTree Enhances Employee Engagement With Cisco Soln

MindTree is an IT and IT services provider, which has gained recognition in recent times. Due to its focus on human capital development, it has consecutively been ranked as the No 1 enterprise in the Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) award ranking. The company, while moving forward with its HR initiatives, realised that open communication within the organisation set-up and interaction with each of the employees, or ‘MindTree Minds’ as they are referred to, was proving to be a challenge.

Need to Link ‘MindTree Minds’

This internal annual event called the ‘All Minds Meet Session’ is an effort to communicate with each of the employees at MindTree about the organisation’s health, important milestones achieved and growth areas for the times to come. “In the past, these interactions happened at one of the MindTree campuses itself, where everyone was physically present for a meeting each quarter. However, as MindTree grew in terms of locations and manpower, it was difficult to physically accommodate all the employees inside one campus,” says Ramesh Kumar T, Associate Director for Infrastructure Management at MindTree.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

The company was looking for a technological solution that would allow real-time rich media communication as a substitute for physical presence.

As far as the physical IT infrastructure at MindTree is concerned, it was already live with networking infrastructure and LAN from Cisco. Kumar says, “We have offices in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad and as we were already using Cisco’s LAN infrastructure, we were looking for a similar IP multicast solution, which would be simple, lean, highly available, open and secure and meet our requirements.”

Cisco IP Multicast Fits the Bill

One of the other reasons why MindTree chose Cisco was the huge requirement of bandwidth associated with the deployment. The solution had to accommodate close to 1,000 users at the speed of 100 kbps in order to enable live streaming of video and communication, which was easily addressed by Cisco.

The solution has, in fact, been replicated from the core distribution set-up, which MindTree was already using. It is noteworthy that the solution has been implemented by the core IT team at MindTree and no external help (such as System Integrators) was hired for the same. “The core IT team at MindTree studied the technology in detail and the process to implement it, so everything was managed internally,” says Kumar.

Additionally, the partners in question had no experience themselves of implementing such a solution. It might have helped that one part of the internal network was non-Cisco based (about 5-10 percent). This is where Kumar sensed the opportunity to develop competencies in-house and integrated the solution internally. Some of the resources like documentation, which came along with the solution, and videos, which were available on the Cisco website, also helped. Cost was also an important factor for the selection of the Cisco solution.

A Smoother Communication Picture

The IP multicast solution, when coupled with bandwidth conservation technology, reduced traffic and the number of servers needed by simultaneously delivering a single stream of information to thousands of employees India-wide. “Some of the examples of applications involving one-to-many and many-to-many communications include video and audio broadcasts, videoconferencing or collaboration, dissemination of stock quotes and news feeds, database replication, software downloads and website caching,” says Kumar.

Now MindTree employees participate in the company’s quarterly meets sitting at their desktops. The live AV streams fed over a multicast solution have not only enabled them to connect with peers but have also helped them to reach a wider audience in the extended supply chain.

There is a lot more, which the IT team has planned, with the multicast-based solution “In the future, we would be looking at integrating applications onto this solution, which would help us optimise the investment. Also, more and more internal events would be streamed using this solution,” concludes Kumar.