Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited (MMFSL) is a non-banking finance company established to provide financing to buyers of Mahindra base and tie up tractors, utility vehicles and other vehicles in rural and suburban areas across India. MMFSL has a presence in 425 locations across India.

The company deployed Citrix Presentation Server to centralise its IT infrastructure and improve the performance of its applications, thereby enhancing customer service.

In search of a scalable IT infrastructure

With the financial services sector booming in India, MMFSL has etched out a plan to grow both organically and inorganically. The company wants to penetrate further into the remote, rural villages and semi urban towns.

To realise its goal, the company needed to have new branches fully operational in record time since architect is centralised storage and distributed data capture, the applications are deployed centrally and allowed to access remotely. Further, both new and existing locations needed better systems and controls for internal users to enhance the level of customer service. The company required a scalable IT infrastructure to support the growing number of branches and employees. In addition, this new infrastructure had to enable deployment of applications quickly, without disrupting any of the existing services.

According to Suresh A. Shanmugam, national head, Information Systems and Technology, MMFSL, “Our dependency on the earlier legacy environment had created various challenges in our operations. All recorded data was captured onto the databases at head office and sent to other controlling locations as per branch requirements.  The centralised data storage and data capture from distributed locations during certain time periods like month end was huge volume-based and thus bandwidth became a crucial issue to maintain business continuity. We had also faced the challenge of keeping network bandwidth usage low to save cost and ensure high performance of applications.”

Deploying Citrix Presentation Server

In order to improve the performance of applications and ensure smooth systems availability in a secure environment, MMFSL decided go with Citrix software. The company has partnered with Orient Technologies for implementation and with Magnamious Systems for front end support.

The solution deployed at MMFSL comprised of Citrix Presentation Server and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server running on 15 IBM blade servers. “Earlier we were using Foxpro based legacy applications. After that we used fullfledged Citrix technology for support purposes in regional, state and district controlling offices, but the need for applications made us test the performance of Citrix software in a larger and extended environment. Back-office users, middle management personnel and other users in 363 locations, including many with rural offices are securely accessing customised business applications, MS Exchange, Proxy Intranet and Web based applications in real time,” states Shanmugam

Now users connect through MPLS IP-based, broadband and VSAT links and connectivity is provided by ISPs like HCL Comnet and HCL Infinite on BSNL backbone. The back-office staff uses desktops and the front-office uses laptops and mobile devices to access applications over the network. The company has already taken 700 concurrent licenses from Citrix.

Centralised application management

Citrix has addressed MMFSL’s need for scalability without disrupting existing business activities and services. The disaster recovery (DR) site to transmit data from central location to one of its locations is also executed through the Citrix environment.

As a non-banking finance company, its core business activities centre around collection of Equated Monthly Installments (EMIs) of the loans disbursed. The collection across is outsourced and monitored through system controls. This collection information is captured in the system and reflected at stipulated time intervals. More importantly, efficiency and performance based monthly incentive of the collectors are vetted through the system.

Says Shanmugam, “Extracting and capturing of information by the relevant professionals is now done in real time. Internal users can now check status of collections at any given point of time thereby enhancing their efficiency levels. Citrix Presentation Server software provides efficient, centralised application management and deployment.”

In the near future, MMFSL plans to deploy information resource hungry devices like hand held devices and kiosks across rural India to aid the agents, employees and customers of MMFSL.