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 One of the oldest companies providing packing services, P N Writer & Co. has undergone a major transformation into evolving as Writer Corporation. To meet the demands of its clients, the company has established itself the area of Relocations & Orientation, Information Management, Cash Management and Logistics. The company has a presence in over 55 cities in the country as well as 3 locations internationally. It employs over 3,000 people and has over 2 million sq. ft. of warehousing space. Nitin Arora, CIO, Writer Corporation spoke to Jamsheed Gandhi on the kind of technology implementation that connects his organization together.
Q: What is the mandate given to you by the management?
A: I joined over 15 months back and the company as a whole has been transforming from an owner driven one, to being professionally managed. The company is looking at technology as the essential component that will drive change. While technology was quite strongly implemented, there was no user involvement. This has changed.
Q: What are the various technology enablement’s in place?
A: The first challenge was to get all our offices connected. This was a bit of an issue as we have warehouses which are quite far from city limits. Here, last mile connectivity has been a major hurdle, which has been attended to by our service providers. We are in the process of taking our WAN one step ahead and incorporate it as a Virtual Private Network. This will connect 10 cities and over 30 offices or locations. We have a team of 30 people that look into all the technology issues within the company.
Q: For connectivity, what kind of vendors are you working with?
A: While we feel VSNL is the only vendor who has a national presence, we have HCL Infinity as our partner. They have delivered to us good connectivity along with MTNL & BSNL. Depending on our locations, we have deployed links between 128 Kbps to 2 Mbps. We have changed our e-mail application and have deployed the Mithi ConnectServer, which is Linux based. We are now able to put over 1000 mailboxes on one server.
Q: What is being deployed in the next few months?
A: We are centralizing our infrastructure into a single data center of about 700 sq. ft. This will house 15 racks in total, but will start with 7 active racks. We have incorporated a solution from APC for the cooling and power needs of the data center. Through this, we are going to be able to consolidate server, storage and security all in one place.
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