With the growing reliance of enterprises on their technology backbones, it is imperative to have a superior on-premise infrastructure that can ably support mission-critical applications. While performance is key, the infrastructure must also be future-ready and easy to integrate into cloud strategies to support business growth aspirations.

Indian Express Limited is a national news media publishing company with widely circulated dailies in English and regional languages, as well as a popular weekly entertainment magazine. The company was in the midst of growing its network of publications and publishing centers. However, its SAP ERP Central Component application was facing performance bottlenecks. This issue cropped up and persisted because of the greater burden on its servers as they grew, compelling the company to look at alternative solutions.

After thoroughly assessing the customer’s challenges, IBM business partner Team1 Consulting Private Limited, in collaboration with the expert team at IBM, proposed IBM Power servers designed for data-intensive, mission-critical workloads that require superior availability, reliability, security, and performance. As part of the modernization path, Indian Express also leveraged IBM FlashSystem, a key component of the IBM Storage for Data Resiliency portfolio, which handles some of the most challenging application and data workloads. It is engineered to deliver fast response and recovery operations from data breaches and cyber-attacks. The result is a modern, robust and scalable infrastructure in a secure environment that positions Indian Express Limited for growth.

“As organizations like Indian Express transition to become digital-first, their underlying IT infrastructure must be refreshed to transform business workflows and processes for enhancing productivity and efficiency, while being scalable to serve large workloads. IBM Power servers are purpose-built for data-intensive workloads and score better than competing architectures due to their performance characteristics and uptime reliability,” says Lata Singh, Partner - GIC Strategic Partners Leader, IBM Consulting.

“IBM’s unique proposition offered the twin advantages of better core performance and better reliability which could facilitate an infrastructure refresh even after factoring growth in emerging workloads for the future,” says Vijay Godiyal, Deputy General Manager, Information Technology, Indian Express.

To propel its cloud and digital transformation strategy in line with business expansion plans, Indian Express needed a solid foundation for its hybrid cloud approach. IBM Power coupled with IBM FlashSystem provided the perfect mix of high performance and multiple scale-up and scale-out options that allowed them to refresh their infrastructure. Team1 Consulting worked closely with the client to help build confidence and guided them in deploying the solution.

“Implementing this portfolio of IBM compute and storage solutions has taken us several strides forward in terms of availability and reliability of systems. In addition, it improved flexibility, performance, and ease of management with reduced cost. We have benefitted with a drastic reduction in the time required to run day-end reports on SAP due to the increased memory bandwidth and simultaneous multi-threading capabilities,” noted Vijay Godiyal.

“It’s important to focus on SAP skills and networking capabilities of the implementation partner to drive successful implementation. IBM along with Team1 Consulting were able to think beyond the project parameters to enhance this new-age solution,” added Lata Singh.

With a constant focus on improving its offerings, Indian Express has always sought to embrace the latest technologies and processes. Today, the company is benefiting from enhanced reliability, availability, flexibility, increased performance, reduced costs, and ease of management after working with Team1 Consulting to implement IBM’s infrastructure offerings.