Overview

Leading Indian media house chooses SAP on hybrid cloud to boost business efficiency

Together with a leading Indian media house, we helped them ready their IT environment to meet their future needs. As a diversified business group, the client has multiple lines of business, and their SAP and application systems were hosted and managed as part of an existing engagement with a Bangalore-based provider. This existing engagement had proven to be unsatisfactory both in terms of cost as well as performance.

With an upcoming renewal and hardware refresh of the existing infrastructure, the client began to investigate if the landscape could be modernized with a focus on cost and performance optimization, and they began to evaluate providers that could deliver these outcomes.

Client profile

The client is India’s largest print media company, publishing over 300 editions of five different newspapers in over 12 states, with a daily readership of over 66 million people. They are a publicly listed company, with a 2020 revenue of over INR 22 billion.

They’re also one of India’s only media conglomerates to enjoy a leadership position in multiple states and multiple languages and are a dominant player in all their major markets. Other key lines of business include a leading regional radio channel, multiple media portals and multiple mobile applications for their rapidly expanding digital audience.

Vision
Vision

Reducing costs while ensuring improved performance and responsiveness

With business interests that span media, publication and other diversified businesses, the client has aggressive growth plans for their various business units.

In the media and entertainment industry the demands placed on the infrastructure can be dynamic as they can fluctuate based on current events. Agility and flexibility are therefore key to the client’s operations.

Their primary challenges included:

  • A rigid, inflexible arrangement with their current provider with high lock-in.
  • Infrastructure that wasn’t agile or elastic enough to meet dynamic business requirements.
  • High one-time costs and no consumption-based billing, which led to high operational costs and sub-optimal resource utilization.
  • High time to resolution when attempting to resolve issues pertaining to the SAP and application landscape.

'We were chosen because of an ability to demonstrate significant cost and performance optimization through our SAP on Cloud platform-delivered services.'

Transformation
Transformation

Meeting business imperatives through IT modernization

We were chosen because of an ability to demonstrate significant cost and performance optimization through our SAP on Cloud platform-delivered services, as well as the requisite expertise to modernize and manage the client’s mission-critical SAP and application environment in an agile and responsive manner.

Uninterrupted operations with multi-site deployment and intra-site redundancy

With multiple data centers to choose from pan-India, the client was able to choose our Bangalore data center as the primary site and our Mumbai data center as the DR site, interconnected for always-on performance. The solution we created also involved intra-site redundancy and platform-delivered managed backup services for maximum resiliency.

A platform that’s agile, cost effective, and secure by design

Our proven and robust hybrid cloud services allowed them the flexibility to choose the appropriate platform for each element of the solution.

At the primary site a combination of our SimpliVPC Hosted Private Cloud platform and dedicated nodes was chosen to run the client’s SAP development and production landscape and other mission-critical applications, including Qlikview.

At the DR site the client was able to leverage our elastic, VMware-based SimpliCloud public cloud platform to achieve significant cost reduction through consumption-based billing, while still maintaining critical levels of performance and security.

The entire infrastructure landscape is managed 24/7 for maximum availability, security and performance, thus freeing up critical resources within the client’s IT team to focus on their business objectives.

Migrating customer data and upgrading the database

As part of the transformation, the client also needed us to migrate the data and applications from the incumbent provider’s data center, as well as upgrade the existing database from Oracle 12 to Oracle 19C at both the DC and DR sites. To facilitate the data migration, we shipped 20TB of storage devices to the client’s office, and replicated incremental data migration over-the-wire using third-party replication tools.

'The entire infrastructure landscape is managed 24/7 for maximum availability, security and performance, thus freeing up critical resources within the client’s IT team.'

Results
Results

Reducing existing costs while ensuring improved performance & resiliency

By moving to our SAP on Hybrid Cloud platform, the client was able to see a cost reduction of over 30% when compared to the previous provider. Our solution increased the performance and responsive of the SAP and application environment significantly, while simultaneously ensuring resiliency against unforeseen outages.

A platform that delivers vastly improved user and customer experience

The refreshed, modernized environment leverages our hybrid cloud platform that can automatically scale up or down based on load — delivering vastly improved client and user experience without ever being over-budget.

Being future ready

With a successful migration of their existing SAP and mission-critical applications to a modernized and optimal infrastructure platform, NTT has laid the foundation for the client to experience a smooth and non-disruptive eventual transition to NTT’s ‘SimpliHANA’ SAP HANA managed cloud platform when the time is right.