Life Insurance major, Aviva India, needed a robust IT strategy to support its growing business and its ambitious expansion plans. The company banked heavily on open source and the results were excellent.
With over 135 branches across the country and a paid-up capital of Rs 20.04 billion, Gurgaonbased Aviva India, one of India’s fastest-growing Life insurance companies, has shown steady growth over the last few years. As its business grew, the company, which is a joint venture between Aviva Plc, a British assurance company, and Dabur Group, realised the need to streamline its IT infrastructure and operations to keep pace with the rapid growth. But the escalating IT costs needed to be checked. As a result, the company ditched the use of proprietary software for few of its critical applications and decided to go the open source way. The migration proved to be a breeze for the company. Today, 25 per cent of Aviva India’s IT infrastructure is made up of FOSS tools.
When we got in touch with Harnath Babu, CIO of Aviva India, to understand the company’s tryst with FOSS, he said: “Our business case study is a very good example of how open source has the potential to set a company on the fast lane to growth and success. Initially, we had deployed proprietary technologies from Microsoft and IBM to build and run applications. We were scaling up really fast in terms of business and IT infrastructure. The requirement for licences to host the applications and rapid development naturally grew. This was a clear indication that we had to cut costs in a major way. The cost of server management was high. Moreover, in order to administrate the technlogies, we needed to have dedicated and skilled resources in proprietary technologies which also meant investing a lot of money in upkeep and maintenance.” on the entire process. So we decided to switch over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),” explains Harnath Babu.
For Aviva India, it was important to get on board a good implementation partner who could ensure that the company was able to enjoy the advantages of open source. Aviva found that Red Hat was the right choice with broader open source technology and support offerings and the migration happened within a month for few of LOB applications.
The company also deployed the Red Hat Cluster suite and the results were rewarding. “We deployed the application and we found that it was much more scalable; the performance was amazingly better and it helped us save a lot of money. Recently, we embarked on a project that included restructuring the data centre, virtualisation and consolidation. Once we were completely virtualised, we implemented Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), a full virtualisation solution that can run multiple virtual machines. We then deployed the Linux OS and JBoss subsequently,” shares Harnath Babu.