"WAN Optimisation Offers A Good RoI Possibility"

CRISIL is well-known in India as an advisory and ratings firm. Biztech2.0 caught up with Hiren Shah, director – Technology, CRISIL, to gain an insight into the role of IT in the advisory and ratings business; the company’s virtualisation strategy; WAN optimisation and other upcoming initiatives.

What benefits have you reaped from the WAN optimisation drive?

The WAN optimisation initiative offered a good RoI possibility as the bandwidth costs in India are still very high when compared to global standards. We realised that CRISIL’s business was growing very fast, so the bandwidth demand was also on the upswing. The cost to the company would thus, increase in a linear proportion while trying to meet this increasing demand.

The WAN optimisation initiative has provided us with a virtual upgrade of about six to seven times more bandwidth than before. The project’s RoI assessment period was six months. We have already crossed that period and have paid back for the initiative.

What is the virtualisation strategy adopted by CRISIL?

We did take some initiatives in the past. The first one was to move from rack mount servers to a blade server environment. This has yielded us a lot of benefits because even though we were growing in terms of people, offices etc, we did not have to grow our data centre, the reason being we could pack in more power in the hardware resources.

Currently, we are in the second phase of the virtualisation initiative that deals with the virtualisation of development and production environment servers. The number of servers is in multiples of ten. The first phase included the virtualisation of 12 servers running non-critical functions like patch updations, anti-virus etc, which are a part of the testing environment that the company uses for various applications.

What is the role of the architecture group?

The architecture group defines the enterprise architecture. They do this in collaboration with other IT teams. The team sets up processes, defines standards, for example, which databases or middleware should be used by the company, what are the standards the IT teams should adopt for building User Interfaces (UIs) etc. The architecture group has standardised various tools used for reporting platforms, databases, application layers, servers etc. There is also a governance mechanism viz. the Architecture Review Board that re-looks at the applications that are in the design phase before they are given a ‘go ahead’ for full-fledged development.

Tell us about the IT initiatives being taken at CRISIL.

The team is currently engaged in integrating Web2.0 technology into some of the applications. We are also working on portals and knowledge management solutions that will help us to incorporate Web2.0 features into the applications.

Besides Web2.0, we are talking to the business for externalising some of their solutions to the Web and integrating e-commerce into them.

What is the role of IT in CRISIL’s businesses like Advisory, Ratings and Research?

The workflow in advisory is completely automated. They use a knowledge management system, which helps them do resource deployment as that is a critical activity for them. The system also helps to assure that they use their resources in an optimum manner.

In ratings, the company has a system that completely tracks the ratings workflow for each of the different businesses in ratings. For research, we have an automated research delivery platform. We have some products in the funds research space that are provided to the market too. In the offshore business, we have a lot of automated tools with databases that are integrated with the customer databases.