IDEA Cellular: IT Lends Bright IDEAS

Idea Cellular started as a two-circle company operating in Maharashtra and
Gujarat. After a spate of mergers and acquisitions, today it is an eight-circle
company with a scattered operations set-up that needs to be re-aligned.

Earlier, IT systems at each circle were operating as independent units with
different types of hardware and software. Hence, there were obvious limitations
with respect to daily operations, hardware and software duplication and
regionalized MIS reporting systems. Therefore, Idea moved to a common platform.

Some of these migrations are still happening-the recent acquisition,
Escotel, worked on Ramco Marshal while the AP circle, on SAP; now both these
apps are moving to Oracle.

A web-based application was developed for the activation of customers,
enabling service charges, receiving customer queries from any media like SMS,
phone or email. Another key challenge was to replace the existing switching
systems-and to centralize all the independent billing systems, mediation
systems and ERP systems of the southern and northern hubs.

The IT focus in Idea was to become more process driven, allowing resources to
be moved through locations without affecting operations. Staffers were initially
coached and pilots were run on a few small projects to ensure a smooth
switchover. Since most processes were thus in place, the EDGE rollout in Idea
was a smooth affair, though it involved several complex IT processes.

This consolidation of the IT infrastructure centrally at the corporate office
in Pune and the two hubs in Delhi and Pune came under the ambit of the ambitious
Project Galaxy undertaken by Idea.

With consolidation being the mantra, data storage, retrieval and backup were
the essential prerequisites of the storage solution that Idea Cellular was
seeking. Ultimately, Idea opted for a SAN with five SAN boxes in each of its
data centers. And HP Brocade switches connected the SAN boxes to the application
servers at each data center. For Idea, this centralized storage strategy made it
easy to consolidate its resources at various locations with minimal downtimes.