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FERTNET is a close user group on Fertilizers Informatics Network that NIC has developed for the Deptt. of Fertilizers. This is a Web-based information system that provides information relating to fertilizer movement, production, distribution and subsidies paid to different fertilizer producers, equated freight fixation and payment handling for fertilizer imports.

It has become easier to plan the widespread distribution of fertilizers based on the inter-related informatics support on demand and supply positions. This in turn helps in reducing transportation costs and demand-supply gap, and optimize the use of stocks. While most reports are available across all concerned departments, there are some (like the subsidy payment system) that are kept confidential.

Timely information about the production capacities and actual production ensures smooth and timely supply of fertilizers in the country including remote areas for sustainable agricultural production. While different modules under the project are already operational, the next step would be to integrate them to make the information available on a single window.

IntraGOV is a Web-based portal that integrates G2G (government to government) and G2E (government to employees) operations. The key issue of G2E services is empowerment of the employee and resulting accountability. The project started in 2002 with the successful implementation of IntraNIC portal-a Sharepoint based Intranet solution.

IntraGOV solution is based on the IntraNIC model. This framework is built on Open Source and based on open standards. The application is built using Zope as the application and Web server, Plone as the content management server and Python as the scripting language. The portal offers services like collaboration and messaging services, document and content management, workflow automation and integration of various intra-departmental applications.

Signature Verification System is a rule and image based system that doesn't require any physical handling of instruments while verifying signatures during validating transactions. The system has a Hierarchical System Model with one central server and multiple regional servers. It auto-retrieves signatures and does intelligent processing. The list of authorized signatories has been converted into business logic and the user no longer needs to read through the written instruments. The signature that best qualifies business logic, is displayed to the user for verification. Re-verification option that follows the maker-checker concept, is used for instruments that are of high value or are suspicious in nature. The time taken for signature verification is reduced substantially as the users need not search for the required signature from the list of signatories in the core system for an account.

The APIN over IVR system is a very thoughtful project. It's meant to help the bank's existing credit card customers by letting them set/reset their ATM pin (APIN) number over the IVR system. An APIN is required if a customer needs to use the ATM. Credit card customers do not use this very frequently, so there is a tendency to forget it. The typical process followed is to post the APIN by courier when a request comes in, which is costly, and customers can forget it again.

To solve the problem, five different systems have been integrated to achieve this, starting from the IVR system and ending at the credit card system. The system also integrates with the CRM system and sends an SMS alert on the customer's mobile phone for APIN change confirmation. If there's no mobile phone, then the CRM's APIN tracking system helps the customer identify the history of APIN generation.

The Kerala Education Grid by Prof. KR Srivathsan of the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala aims to create a network of educational institutions across Kerala (and eventually the whole of India ). It has already setup a core of four resource centers across Kerala. Each resource center is treated as a repository of information and a mechanism to disburse information. These resource centers are at IIITM-K, CUSAT, College of Engineering ( Trivandrum ) and NIT ( Calicut).

The KEG works in conjunction with the NPTEL (National Program for Technology Enabled Learning and Teaching) and has a sanctioned budget of around 7.5 crore rupees. It leverages the resources of EDUSAT and ERNET to manage its network and infrastructure more efficiently.

A web based portal (edugrid.in) is the front end for this portal and can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world. The site hosts information about various courses, resources for teachers, self assessment exams and knowledge based documents (like whitepapers and concept notes). It further allows the visitor to post a query to its expert panel using a ticketing system. You can reuse the token number to read the reply any time.

Project Kosh is an in-house project. This division of ITC was using an MRP II system called MANMAN, implemented 15 years ago. Although it has served the core business functions well, the business growth outgrew its capabilities. So, they implemented an integrated infromation system where the machines and systems could directly communicate with the ERP s ystem. As a result of this, the system can make quick estimation of costs of producing a product, as soon as a customer asks for it, and provide the specifications.

This system is useful in a market with rapid changes. The solution consists of SAP ECC 5.0 and IS-Mill with printing and packaging specific templates from Dr. Lauterbach and partners. It also interfaces with Rockwell MES and RF Device based warehouse mgmt.

Project Trident is an in-house ITC project aimed at reconstructing and extending their existing IT infrastructure for future business needs. Today, ITC has approximately 20,000 employees spread across 400+ direct locations throughout the country. This does not include the 5,300+ e-chaupals spread across eight states. ITC has implemented ERP and customers are using Web applications to streamline their operations. Hence, it's completely dependent on 24x7 availability of IT facilities. To support business needs, a WAN was set up to connect the business locations. Each division implemented servers, desktops and LANs across its operating locations; and business specific, best-fit ERP was rolled out and MIS setup was fully strengthened.

You can now book your air travel tickets using modified ATM machines being deployed by IDBI across India . The idea is to eliminate the need to locate a travel agent at odd hours, during holidays or when businesses are shut for any reason.The philosophy behind using ATMs for this is that these machines are located at a large number of locations and are usable any time of day or night.

These ATMs allow the customer to check for seat availability and book their tickets through the ATM, while paying for the ticket using their IDBI account.

After a ticket has been reserved, you can also query for ticket status using the PNR number.

Currently, IDBI has tied up with Indian (previously Indian Airlines) only. But efforts are underway to add other airlines to the network. The application for the same has been acquired from Quest2Travel while NCR is the supplier of the modified ATM machines.

This is a relatively new project, having started only a year back and has been completed in about 10 months time, with the pilot taking up most of that period (four months). The pilot is currently in progress in Mumbai and the country-wide rollout will be finished in phases over the next three years.

With the insurance sector booming, and many global players entering the Indian market, Indian insurance companies must do something to cater to the growing customer base and gain a competitive edge. That's what Oriental Insurance has done by implementing an integrated application for its non-life insurance business, called INLIAS. The solution has been implemented across Oriental's 193 offices and 25 others operating in parallel mode. The project has been handled by 3i Infotech, which is in the process of implementing it across the rest of the offices. Rolling out a project of this scale is an effort in itself.

The application covers all insurance processes, right from providing quotations to underwriting, claims, processing, re-insurance, and accounting. The solution will allow operational control and all information needed for the day-to-day operations of employees. The clear business benefit from this application is reducing the time taken for various tasks. The project has been implemented on an n-tier architecture, providing a browser front-end to the users.

They access the application over a virtual private network. INLIAS has been built on Oracle Application Server, which has layers for control, operations, and business logic.

Plant Quarantine Department is a part of the Agriculture Department, that keeps track of all plant commodities including cereals, fruits and vegetables, going out or coming into India. The s/w is designed to help Plant Quarantine Stations and to provide quick and quality service to the exporters and importers. It makes sure that the set of tests defined for a particular kind of commodity are applied as per standards. Instead of manually deciding the number and type of tests, the system automatically gives the list of required tests necessary for a particular commodity. A certificate can be generated only once. In case duplicates are necessary, the older one is deleted and a new one printed out, keeping track of the deleted copy. This prevents spurious certification.

GanaSeva Rural Credit Delivery System uses information and communication technologies to solve the problem of providing financial services in rural India. Funded by Microsoft, and conceptualized by Center for Banking and IT division (C-DIT) of IIIT-B, the project has been successfully deployed in five villages in the backward Honavar block of Karnataka. In the system, PDAs are used to gather information about the rural households. This data is loaded to an Integrated Multi-Service Database System. Finally, ATMs with computer console, called Multi-Service Delivery System are placed in a commonly area, and connected to IMDS over CDMA. Banks connect to the IMDS to view citizen profiles, and provide banking services. All incoming requests come through the MSDS. This project has great potential to transform rural India.

The WebSMS project is an excellent example of using simple technology for gaining maximum business impact. It is aimed at managing cable operators, the type of customer who has the tendency to understate his subscriber base leading. This poses a challenge for Sony's sales team, as they have to keep coming up with innovative ways to maximize their collections.

The WebSMS project helps Sony get timely collections and receipts from around 7,000 cable operators spread across the country. It improved their collections and reduced invoicing errors, thereby allowing more accurate revenue recognition and collection. As a result, their monthly book closures started happening around the 3rd or 4th of every month, instead of 24th and 25th. They capture around 9,000 transactions per month, most of which used to happen on paper earlier. The next phase of the project helped them track and reconcile the movement of their IRD boxes, which were worth around Rs. 40 crores.

With so many thousands of IRDs lying around with extra units with distributors for replacements, there were often delays or misses in the IRD movement earlier. Now, this is also solved using WebSMS. The project is based on a typical three-tier architecture based on LAMP-Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP.

AnexGATE, a unified threat management appliance, was implemented at their Internet gateway to add security to their networking infrastructure. This was implemented by Xserve India along with Systronet. The main concern while selecting the solution was the future need to roll out SAP across its two offices at Marol and Bharuch. Borosil wanted to prevent unauthorized access to data transfers happening between its SAP servers and clients between its two offices. In addition, it required that its messaging systems to be secured against attacks.

They could not consider leased lines as an option because of the costs involved. Therefore, they decided to go with a VPN architecture and this needed to be secured and well managed as well. Now, all of Borosil's branches are linked with a secured IP VPN. As a backup, they have also acquired a site-to-site VPN secured with IPSec.

AnexGATE features an SPI firewall, IPS and Internet proxying and local mail server capabilities with anti-spam. In addition, Borosil has implemented a gateway level antivirus, a mail server to streamline their messaging. The requirements were studied, planned and rolled out in one month's time.

The electronic bill presentation and payment system or EBPP for short, is more than just a mere billing application deployment across 21 telecom circles of Tata Teleservices. The implementation allowed the company to reach out to its customers in a much better fashion. Bill generation may seem easy, but not when you have to print more than 20 million statement pages every month across 8 bill cycles.

The output application ReportSuite is used for managing the billing process, and provides several interesting functions such as printing bills in regional languages, prioritize on high-value bill printing, multi-mode personalized bill delivery, and much more. It also allows multi-channel billing, wherein a bill can be printed, faxed, or e-mailed.

The business benefit in using such a solution is of course a saving in printing cost, and better response to customers, especially those requiring a duplicate bill. 30% of the company's bills have been migrated to electronic statement delivery.

The solution has been seamlessly integrated with the core billing application as well as Tata Tele Services Multi-Channel Customer Interface, which is a portal for customer interaction.

Project Butterfly was initiated as part of Tahiliani Design's initiative in reducing problems related to management of huge workload and production. This is an ERP system, which can integrate and manage all types of business needs. It helps in building bridges between structured and unstructured work.

The project is an integration of business value chain to consolidate information and present it in an actionable, understandable format. The biggest problem faced by the organizationwas that information was not available on time and hence critical decisions couldn't be taken. With this integrated system in place, the information became readily available and decision-making, much faster. The key features of the project are inventory management, working capital management, debtor outstanding management, on line real time information for trend and demand analysis and back office management

To make this project work, the company went the Microsoft path. The key components used here were MS Dynamic Navision, MS SQL Server 2000 and MS Windows Server 2003 as the back end components. And as the front end consoles they are using Citrix Metaframe & WTS (which is essentially a thin client) for centralized management and low cost.

UNIBIZ is a project that encompasses a system to consolidate information and processes related to all businesses under one application. Previously, all information was scattered, residing in individual desktops in the form of document files, spreadsheets and mail. Now, if the management had to take any decision, they needed to collate all information, which consumed time. This enterprise wide eBusiness solution gives a single window view of business anytime anywhere. It has helped the organization automate all the important business processes such as manufacturing, purchase finance, HR, order management and marketing.

The application runs on Intel/Linux platform having two servers in an active/active cluster attached to an external SAN storage. One of the servers runs the Application, Discoverer, Forms services while the the other runs the Database and Concurrent Manager Services. They run over Red Hat Advanced Server and Cluster Suite.

The cluster is designed in such a way that if one server goes down, the services running in that server would automatically shift to the other.

InFocus is a business intelligence project that fulfills three key roles. One, it is used for consolidation at the CFO's office for all the financial and business related data that flows in from all of Wipro's 10 vertical interests and 33 service offerings for those verticals, across four geographic divisions. The second purpose of InFocus is to perform operational planning based on this data and finally to provide appropriate compensation and benefits to their employees. The aims of the project include removing human inefficiencies in manual repetitive process; improve reporting by being able to now perform analysis among all the data sets gathered. These reports can be made use of for faster customer-facing services, as well as internal reporting.

Lakshya is a complete ERP implementation project. It was implemented using ASAP methodology which is recommended by SAP for its ERP. The company went in for a two system landscape, in which SAP development and customization was carried out in one set of servers and live data was hosted on another. The servers were put in clustered fail-over mode using MC ServiceGuard, which provides very high up time by shifting the application to the standby server in case of problems in the main server. The system helped Adani Wilmar to derive ROI (return on investment) on MRP (Manufacturing Requirements Planning), QC (quality control), price control through price masters, credit checks, consumption based planning, internal orders and vendor analysis. The system also helps to streamline all business processes under one roof. HCL Infinet was chosen as the VPN partner for majority of locations and direct point to point leased lines were used for some other locations where transaction volume was expected to be high. In some very remote locations, Adani Wilmar also used VSATs. As on date some 80 different locations log into the central server and perform transactions through dialups, broadbands, CDMAs, leased lines, RF links and VSATs.

SAP ERP was employed by this garment manufacturer due to a rapidly growing business. This was done in order to automate their business processes and improve efficiencies. But, their network was not able to handle the load of SAP and Oracle, resulting in production delays. To get rid of this, they upgraded their existing 100 Mbps network to a Gigabit network with managed switches. This helped the company strengthen its backbone, leading to higher production and faster shipment despatch. The company has even gone one step further and deployed IP cameras for security reasons so as to create a secure working culture in the organization. The company is enjoying steady growth thanks to the wonders of IT.

This JDEdwards implementation by ACCEL has helped in forcasting supply and demand with greater accuracy, leading to better procurement and inventory management. It had to be implemented in their fan (chakkan) unit, mainly due to rising competition from foreign as well as local brands. Under this, everything from their shop floor to production lines, inventory, procurement, and even accounting was automated and brought online. This has reduced lead times throughout the supply chain, cut costs and improved decision making. The ERP solution uses Oracle 9i and MS SQL 2000 databases on their Web and production-class servers respectively, and IBM WebSphere 5.0 application server is running on Windows Server 2003.

VPN connectivity over broadband is what this project's all about. It's helped BgSE, a company that's jointly promoted by Bangalore Stock Exchange and its members, to carry out secure and speedy trading at a fraction of the cost they were incurring earlier. Prior to using broadband, BgSE members (over 100) were using dial-up lines, VSATs, and leased lines for connectivity. Broadband has reduced their initial acquisitino cost by half and monthly recurring cost by a fourth. Members can now pass on this benefit to their customers. It's now possible to securely connect to member networks, and get the performance needed for running real time applications.

When the number of users going online at CNBC went up, they were also faced with a rise in the security threats. The company chose Fortinet's Forgate 400-A and 800-A firewalls for its offices in Delhi and Mumbai since these appliances could be configured for different Internet service providers with redundant failover links for continuous service to the users. Fortigate has integrated real-time AV, firewall, VPN, IDS/IPS, content filtering, and traffic shaping services in these boxes. Two of these boxes were used at each location in HA mode. Now, both offices are securely linked and issues such as network congestion have been put to rest.

Project InSight is truly a remarkable example of using an IT infrastructure monitoring and management solution to manage other offshore IT infrastructures. That's one of the businesses that Cognizant is in. They've built a solution around HP's OpenView platform that allows them to manage their customers' IT infrastructures remotely, and with ease. It provides their customers enterprise management tools, an IT helpdesk, and an InSight portal. The last one let's customers see the health of their IT infrastructure, trends in the past and projected likely behavior. It follows a shared service model, where the customer doesn't pay for the entire management platform.

Anusandhan, (www.anusandhan.net), provides information on public and private science & technology infrastructure, expertise and facilities, associated educational, government and private organizations, and their activities and related business dealings. The coverage includes 2500 publicly funded R & D institutions and 1500 privately funded in-house R & D centers of industry classified in 30 sectors. The portal is aimed at all those who benefit from Indian science and technology, from scientists to policy makers and students to professors. The portal has been developed on J2EE technology based on an n-tier Architecture. Right now, the portal is free for the general public.

IOB-CROWN (Centralised Resources Over Wide-area Network) is an in-house core banking software deployed in 1500+ branches. The software is capable of e-banking and inter & intra bank fund transfer. The user can withdraw money (upto Rs. 25,000), transfer funds or clear drafts from any branch under CBS. This is running on SCO OpenServer 6.0, which runs on a low end Sun RISC server. It supports 3,000 users. There are three application servers, providing load balancing, with another server as a backup. The servers are logged with Sybase log every 5 minutes for recovery. All branches connect to this server over TCP/IP. The Front-End is called APT, which is a Sybase tool.

AGMARKNET is a grand project that has networked 1700 agricultural produce markets for effective interchange of market prices. A portal called agmarknet.nic.in has been created where this information would be uploaded, and be made accessible. It's useful for traders, processors, exporters, researchers, policy makers, and planners alike with information like agricultral census, grade information on products and the like. The Ministry of Agriculter aims to create a national database with AGMARK-NET that will feed into a statistical and analysis report for agriculture decision makers. IFFCO has also deployed around 1000 kiosks in rural areas, which integrate with AGMARKNET. The project based on a disconnected client/server architecture and has huge potential to help growth in the Indian the rural sector.

Computerized Document & Index Search System or CODISS, developed by NIC, is aimed at providing a computerized search and query facility on all the documents, which need to be retrieved when needed, from the record room of the Land Records Department. The application allows for the entry of details of the document, while providing a two level search facility to the user. One is at the document level and second, a more detailed level, for search of a key field within a document for which index details have been entered. This multi-user role based & client-server application stores data in UNICODE. The user interface is in Marathi.

The ERP project, e-Urja, aims to handle the complexities of the energy sector. GUVNL needed better corporate governance, operational effectiveness and financial sustainability. This is achieved through Enterprise Resource Planning, which aims to integrate the business processes/functions of an organization so that key resources such as man, material, machine, money, etc. are utilized in the best interest of the organization. The current system has reduced the amount invested in inventory, processing costs per business transaction, procurement costs, and the time taken to perform a financial closure and prepare financial statements.

The channel integration across CRM project is meant to take care of providing a consisent user experience across various channels from where customer service requests can come in. At the heart of this system is the bank's CRM application. This currently allows ICICI Bank's users to log complaints on behalf of its customers. This project provides integration points to this system from other channels. Currently, a JSP based front-end has been created on a new sub-domain called https://requests.icicibank.com, which connects to the CRM system through a middleware framework created in Java with XML for messaging, and hosted on the Pramati App server. The IVR system is also being integrated with this system, which is currently in pilot, but complete roll out is expected by the time you read this story.

Intimate fashion is a fashion and garment house and has around 32 manufacturing lines. Garments manmufacturing is something that needs to be monitored properly at various stages of production. So in case of any fault, it can be immediately rectified at least before it goes into packaging. To reduce the time which is used in this process, they have taken help of technology. So 28 of all 32 manufacturing lines have been assigned a supervisor with a WiFi enabled PDA. The supervisor is to check the garments for any kind of faults and feed the details of the unit to the PDA. This data is then sent immediately to a central database over the wireless network. Then the data undergoes certain validity checks. If the validity check crosses a pre-defined threshold, the data is immediately sent to a superior who can then take a decision on weather to stop the manufacturing or continue if it's tolerable. The complete application is developed by the in-house IT team and uses commodity products like PDAs from HP for front-end and MS SQL as the back end. This has led to faster decision making, an increase in the production speed.

Microsoft Navision 4.0, an ERP system, was used to streamline the business processes. Setting up power plants is a mammoth exercise. It is too expensive and complicated to be managed with adhoc or manual systems. Only a solution as sophisticated as an ERP can effectively manage the operations. Since the plant is in the construction phase, the core requirement was pertaining to project costing and monitoring of work contracts and purchase orders. The system provides Jindal Power integrated functionality for financial management including Fixed Asset Accounting, Budget Monitoring & Analysis, and Inventory & Stores Management.

Primary Datacenter was aimed to build a high availability datacenter development for business continuity. It provides benefits such as improvement in business value, application availability, continuity of operations, productivity improvement, total cost reduction and single point management. The total data center architecture was built on APC Racks with APC UPS. It's a very complex environment having heterogenous platform. This includes ERP and mail on IBM, database on Sun, and thin client application on Intel based servers. The data center uses state of the art technologies from different vendors. It took three months to have it up and running.

Project MF-Connect 200 helps the company provide better and faster financial services to rural villages and semi-urban towns. In this project, all applications and storage are centrally located, and remote branches access them through a Citrix Presentation Server. This allows better monitoring, mgmt, and maintenance of IT infrastructure without any disruption of services. It has also reduced administration costs.

The electricity board of MP developed its own revenue management system, as nothing was readily available commercially that would match its requirements. The board expected to achieve quite a few objectives with this, such as minimize energy losses, map consumer billing directly to the sub-transmission network, make field officers more accountable by introducing feeder wise billing, process automation, eliminate duplicate data entries, etc. The developed application provides details of pole lines and sub-stations, cash collection and reconciliation information, billing details, complaints & redressals, installments, security deposits, defaulter management, interest and incentive.

The company designed its campus for supporting its global customers and their security requirements. The design provides a layer of segregation at the physical as well as logical. The entire campus was built on a 10 Gigbit backplane, in order to provide Eco Friendly Environment for Syntel's workforce. The business objectives were to enhance and simplify the work culture on the campus, support multiple business verticals, have the capability to segment operational areas, and also have the capability to host customer equipment. The campus supports mobility services, security standards, provides voice and data services and Centralized Management. The network architecture of the infrastructure is built with SMF on the backbone, CAT6 to the desktop and Intelligent Cabling System for the Data Center. All servers in the data center are on Giga/10 Giga and S-flow at each switching port is used to enable traffic analysis and Intrusion detection, segregation of network services, and high availability. For voice, it uses IP PBX, IP Phones and even unified messaging that allows multi-party conferencing, one-number-follow-me personal call director, and much more.

Implementation of Fortinet at Amity protects the institution's network at the gateway level. This solution is an all-in-one architecture with scalability, performance, bandwidth management and optimization, in addition to conventional security features such as firewall, anti virus and intrusion prevention. With this, Amity has seen a drop in network intrusions, virus outbreaks and security incidents.

Big Bang is an SAP implementation by Sanghi Industries with Coconut Software as the implementation partner. Sanghi, a cement manufacturer, was looking for a better way to manage their production and supply chain lines. They first considered building their own 'ERP' system, butfinally, mySAP ERP 2004 system was selected. The system is currently operational at their cement and clinker plants, which are linked over VPN links. They also have a distribution management system implemented on .NET. The ERP allows Sanghi and its customers to instantly get information about the status of their orders and fulfillment.

Sterlite Optical Technologies is in to Optical Fiber manufacturing. They have developed an in-house solution to automate their core business process. This MES package correctly analyzes the deficiencies in process resulting in cost reduction and continuous process improvements. They ware able to map the process flow, interface with process and QA machines, barcode mapping, automatic mailing and alerts of daily production related reports to respective departments, QA Sampling, control machines through process feedback, scrap management, monitoring scrap generated in process and disposal of same. Plus, it also does finished good management.

Rajasva Vaad Avlokan is an attempt to put all the revenue related cases of the district of Sultanpur on the Internet. Users can get information regarding their cases directly from the place of their living or even from a nearby kiosk. The project will also help presiding officers monitor the cases pending in their courts. It will also help advocates in giving the status of their court cases, so that they can plan better. This will reduce the time to decide the case and bring in greater efficiency as well. This will also help limit the malpractices of corrupt mediators. An added feature of the project is that the court cases are available in local language (Hindi).

Formerly Munjal Auto Components, the company that manufactures gear blanks and spline shafts, recently implemented Microsoft Navision for its financial, supply chain, and HR management. Supply chain management covers the entire chain of manufacturing, production planning, and control. The moment a customer places an order, the information flows seamlessly across all departments. The HR module encompasses the entire payroll management and even integrates it with the time machine. Their objective was to have an integrated information system that would provide all information on manufacturing, materials, and financial information. The project has helped improve overall productivity, leading to better customer servicing.

The well-known Indian pharma recently acquired the German based Generics pharma company, Heumann Pharma. The challenge before it was to create an integrated IT network for seamless operation across continents. This posed a challenge because Heumann systems were fragmented. Thus the company zeroed in on and deployed an SAP R/3 ERP solution. Plus, it had to create a multi-lingual, multi-location system that would be well integrated with SAP. The overall solution provided better coordination and interaction between the two companies. This helped both companies meet their base objective of maximizing customer care. The solution was implemented across the entire company in a short span of 95 days.

Travelguru portal provides the capability to provide the cheapest available airline fares with multiple choices to its customers on a real time basis. This scalable and stable technology provides the most comprehensive function- alities that are needed by any online travel company. It gives real time availability and booking mechanism through the Net, hassle free /agent free booking access, display of multiple choices in one go, cross sell functionality with options to buy various products from one screen. It's based on a multi-layered .NET architecture, has high-availability data clusters, and connectivity to various mainframes for real time content.

Tamilnadu Electricity Board has recently computerized their entire billing operations, which has reduced the burden on the common man of standing in long queues. It also eliminates human error in billing. Today within a particular region, a person can pay his electricity bills in any of the collection centers. By doing this computerization, TNEB can have information on every single collection center at the end of the day, which was not possible earlier. By this the head of the region and head of TNEB will know the percentage of collections at the end of every day, how many people have paid on time and otherwise. This improves cash flows for and the data will be useful for analyzing the pattern of collections and usage.

The data consolidation from different hosts project was started with objective of timely submission of results to the management. The objectives were to bring all the branches on one solution, with all of them networked and a way to ensure validity of data. They also needed to consolidate the data from all the distributed databases. The bank had to ensure connectivity of all branches with the central database as even one failure to connect would have put the entire effort at jeopardy. The migration and data collection process was done using a software called BancMate on all decentralized branches. An ETL tool was used for consolidation. The data from core banking solution was also consolidated side by side.

The software project for the Tamil Nadu Rural Employment Guarantee scheme is to enable easy collection and management of all registration details of family members in villages, along with their photographs. The software also takes care of creating job cards for each of them and printing work details, attendance and payment information. This data is then consolidated at the village block level. It has been currently implemented across 3915 villages across 6 districts in the Tamil Nadu. The entire application and platform chosen for this was Open Source, because they thought it would fit the scale of implementation, and also help them save cost. The software is bi-lingual, supporting English and Tamil. The printed job card is in Tamil. The servers used for data location are located with NIC Chennai. The department has also provided offline software for all the villages, so that day to day data can be entered, and reports can also be generated. All this data is consolidated and sent to the state level server. From there, it's disseminated to the public. Each village has a PC based on RedHat Desktop Linux 4, with PHP and PEAR, and Open Office 2.0 with Tamil fonts.

The US based firm that's into the Product Lifecycle Management space has 600+ developers in its Pune based development center. To support these developers, the IT team has setup a world-class data center that even connects to other key centers worldwide over a 12 Mbps link using MPLS. Plus there's 4 Mbps for external FTP servers for customers, site VPN connectivity, browsing, etc. They have a single Active Directory Domain for Windows authentication worldwide. All servers are connected over Gigabit Ethernet, and plans are on to move to 10 Gbps. 15 TB NAS appliances cater to the storage needs. The developers have even been given VPN

UTI Bank wanted to enrich the banking experience for its customers, so it decided to set up a dedicated call centre by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform and Oracle 11i E-business suite for the CRM application. Earlier, the bank was following conventional banking system of customer support through IVR across various branches. Due to this, the personnel spent more time handling complaints than on customer acquisition. The call center currently has 120 agents, offers skill based routing for callers to match their requirement, has an agent performance management tool, is integrated with the IVR, and has tools for product management and reporting.

VISESH started this project in-house for its Knowledge Process Outsourcing Division to build an Infrastructure with MPLS VPN Solution for multi site corporate locations. The infrastructure supports voice and data transparently across seats (regardless of location) along with advanced security, remote console & back-up mechanisms with built in redundancy across the network. The benefits from this are reliability, security, flexibility and availability. All these benefits have resulted in companies outsourcing their critical business processes to V Connect. The Infrastructure provides world class security like Single Sign-On, Biometric authentication, etc.

Most banks today use multiple channels to reach out to customers. The difference with YES Bank is that it's built these channels in the shortest possible time, by using the latest technologies, and in the most cost effective manner. It received an operating license in Sep 2004, and launched retail and corporate Internet banking, ATM & debit cards, mobile banking and a manual contact center within just 8 months. Now that's quite an achievement. In Net banking, it provides two factor authentication and straight through RTGS. It has global debit card and ATM services with access to 18000+ ATMs in India. It allows balance/transaction enquiries on mobile phone, and much more.

YES @ccess is an Internet banking solution for corporate customers. It has been built from scratch which means there is no burden of legacies involved. Its staggered implementation approach ensures that customer feedback guides the way application will take. The project is targeted at corporate customers that include financial institutions, government and SMEs. It has been implemented in a phased manner starting from allowing customers to make routine enquiries such as account statements, checkbook request and transaction enquiry over the Internet and subsequently was scaled up to include enhanced customer interaction in the form of financial transactions over the Internet. The solution is built on Oracle 9i, IBM Websphere 5.1, MS SQL Server 2000, IIS, and IBM HTTP Server.

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