How Atul Limited Saved Millions with FOSS!
In an endeavour to cut down on rising costs and to slash initial investments, Atul Limited, a chemical conglomerate, sought refuge in FOSS. The outcome? The company saved a whopping Rs 85 million within a short span of time.
Bringing down IT costs and managing to save a colossal amount of money in a depressed economy is no mean feat! Atul Limited, part of the Rs 90 billion Lalbhai Group, has set an example of sorts as it charted a new growth story with the help of open source technology. Not many know that the Gujarat-based company that has ventured into segments like aromatics, bulk chemicals, crop protection, polymers, etc, is India’s first private sector firm to be inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952. With a customer base of 4,000, the enterprise has kept up its winning streak by optimising its IT costs through the use of FOSS. We got in touch with Balaranjith T, general manager, IT, Atul Limited, to retrace the open source journey of the company.
Tryst with FOSS
Primarily a user of Oracle and Microsoft technologies, the firm came across bottlenecks like vendor lock-in and the rising cost of IT, including software licences. But being an IT-savvy company that was directed by the management to automate each and every manual process, the firm decided to go the open source way. “We also found that leading technology companies like Facebook, Yahoo and Google use open source solutions for their business critical applications. This gave us the confidence to adopt open source in a big way. Our FOSS journey began in 2009 when we migrated our Oracle E-Business Suite server from the AIX platform to a Linux platform. Then, in 2011, we started using Ubuntu as the primary desktop OS. This helped us to
extend the use of our ageing desktop PCs, as Ubuntu required comparatively less compute power than other proprietary OSs,” explains Balaranjith T.
The open source team at Atul Limited also started developing several custom solutions on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform during the same time. The team primarily started using PHP and MySQL, as both were easy to learn but were more powerful than most of the proprietary technologies. Some of the solutions developed were a vendor portal for entering quotations by the firm’s various suppliers, a time-keeping solution for leave and attendance monitoring, an employee performance monitoring portal, etc. Most of the IT team members were trained through an in-house team on the LAMP platform.
“In 2012, we were searching for a data warehousing solution for our ERP data. While going through the Gartner Magic Quadrant, we came across a solution called Pentaho, which was reviewed as the best open source data warehousing solution. We did a comparative study of Pentaho with other industry leading proprietary solutions. We found that Pentaho performs equally well if not much better than most of the proprietary solutions. We started implementation in late 2012. Initially, we had planned to have Oracle as the back-end database because the source system was Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). But, during implementation, we used MySQL as it is more scalable,” shares Balaranjith.
The IT team also used Pentaho’s reporting feature on top of this solution for its normal reporting requirements and Saiku for business analytics. The team used community editions for both the solutions. Hence, Balaranjith reports, Atul Limited got itself a 100 per cent open source data warehousing and business intelligence solution, which is very unique (Oracle OLTP to MySQL OLAP). Since the implementation in March 2013, the company has migrated most of its reports from Oracle EBS to the data warehousing solution. This has also improved the performance of Oracle EBS as it now handles only transaction processing.
The firm uses open source in almost every domain including operating systems (both servers and end user desktops), data warehousing, business analytics, a document management solution, help desk ticketing, and more. “A range of business-critical applications are developed on open source technologies. The tools used are LAMP, Ubuntu, RedHat Linux, Pentaho Kettle, Mondrain, Saiku Analytics, Ajaxplorer, Mantis, and a lot more,” adds Balaranjith.