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L I N U XD E P L O Y M E N T
7 6 T H E C TO F O R U M 1 O C TO B E R , 2 0 0 5
D ATA centers are increasingly making or
planning to make the move to environ-
ments characterized by Web services
and Service-Oriented Architectures
(SOAs), data grids and the use of virtu-
alization technology. But just how will
open source technologies fit into this
"architecture of the future" is the real
question being asked by almost all CIOs.
To find out how Linux and Open
Source fits in with emerging technolo-
gies and enterprise-wide deployment,
we took up the case study of OM
Logistics, the logistics arm of OM Auto.
Sanjay K Goel, VP (IT), OM Logistics,
who led a team of four to make
an enterprise-wide deployment of the
"disruptive technology", spoke on the
success story.
OM Logistics Limited (OLL) deployed
OM Logistics, the logistics arm of OM Auto successfully
deployed Linux Sujay Nair
ENTERPRISE DEPLOYMENTS
Linux
Sudhir Shetty
AND

L I N U X D E P L O Y M E N T
Linux way back in 2001, against all
odds, when Linux was just making its
entry into India. This huge leap profited
OLL in more than one way.
History
OM Logistics is one of the leading LLPs
in India catering to the nation’s top notch
corporates in the pharmaceutical, textile,
electronics, white goods, food products,
automobiles and other varied industries,
with the ever growing potential of
becoming the No 1 LLP in the Indian
subcontinent.
OM Logistics extends warehousing
mgt. and solutions point-to-point and
door-to-door, time-bound cargo move-
ments through ’ground express’, ’train’
and ’air’, complete container move-
ments, extensive international cargo
handling and several other allied servic-
es. Coupled with its ’direct-on-line’
IT backups, the company has a formida-
ble market position in the Indian logistics
scenario. It’s dedicated to provide value-
added services to global customers for
their door-to-door deliveries all around
the globe.
OLL needed a change in system due
to various reasons. Here, in this article,
we take a look into the main areas of
change required by OLL because of
which they decided to deploy Linux.
Technology Need
OLL, to begin with, was working on a
visual basic s/w for their logistics
requirement and Tally on Windows for
accounting. With 20 systems and a serv-
er all running Windows, they had prob-
lems of meeting the requirements of a
growing organization. There were the
problems of data loss, networking, sys-
tem crash, and viruses. Also, they
were planning on building an in-house
ERP system to meet HR demands and
get a competitive edge.
OLL was looking for the following fea-
tures in the ERP system requirement:
Security, stability, low bandwidth con-
sumption, less virus prone, TCO being
on the leaner side, higher RoI.
What they needed was innovative
solutions for the industry, which would
be something different from what was
being practised at that point of time. The
team working on the change manage-
ment and policy planning concluded that
they would be using synergies that have
been brought around by the IT industry
in every possible domain and what was
being used globally.
Business needs
The basic thrust in any business is
reduction on cost with improved and
value- added service levels. Reduction
in the overall supply chain cost can only
be achieved through improved monitor-
ing systems and systematic implementa-
tions of the technological capabilities.
"The business challenge," explains
Tarun Pant, GM-Corporate, OLL,
"was to boost market share, pan indus-
tries, which at that point was of para-
mount importance."
OLL was spread out across the nation
with 45 branches and was growing at the
rate of 40-50 per cent every year. "The
challenge we had was to integrate the
data from different branches at the HO
based at New Delhi," says Panth. The
need was to integrate the activities
across the nation (all branches) and
monitor the daily activities from the HO.
W ith a growing need to provide real-time
information to our customers, the main
concern was to get information of all
branches on a real-time basis.
The growth of the organization five
years prior to 2001 was more or less
stagnant, ranging between Rs 25-35
crores turnover each year. To increase
the turnover, OLL needed to have a
major market share across verticals and
1 O C TO B E R , 2 0 0 5 T H E C TO F O R U M 7 7
"Corporate IT decisions are not made only due to
cost implications. The aspect of stability, security,
usability and scalability is of paramount importance"

to check the growing investment in
IT and HR.
The challenging task was to meet the
ever-growing need of customers. For
example, some of the manufacturing
companies needed to depend on air
freight to meet their assembly needs,
which also demanded tracking of materi-
als. This posed a challenge for OLL to
create an economical solution for the
customers’ demands.
The aim was to offer a customized
logistics support which would be the best
in the industry and this thought led them
to proceed towards the IT savvy logistics
support for the industry.
They wanted a transparent system,
which would in turn add value to the
logistics chain.
The System
OM Logistics’ ERP is based on "On Line
Transaction Process (OLTP) " technolo-
gy wherein all data are fed directly on
the Web thus enabling to extend the
information in ’real time’ mode.
The ’logistics management applica-
tion’ covers varied modules covering the
entire gamut of activities. In brief, the fol-
lowing modules form the foundation of
the LMA:
On Line Warehouse Management
System: This module provides and man-
ages the status of stocks in the ware-
house. This is an online system.
C R M: It extends information and ’pass-
word protected’ reports to customers on
their material movements, delivery
schedules, transit times, material man-
agement performance levels, lead times,
etc. An effective feature of this module is
that it can be integrated to the cus-
tomers’ ERP (like SAP,etc).
Other modules of the ERP system are
Contracts Management Software,
Costing Analyzer, Sales Analyzer, Load
Planning, Financial Accounting, etc.
H R D:This manages all employee relat-
ed databases ranging from employee
remuneration, postings, performance
evaluation, training and development
planning for individual employees,
and other allied tasks related to
human resources.
Hardware System
The complete ERP system is designed
using COBOL Scripts and Open COBOL
integrated with Perl.
The Application Server runs Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4.0 (Advanced Server).
All users across all branches of OM
Logistics are connected to this server.
The server is an eight processor (Intel
Xeon) with 16 GB RAM.
W eb Server at OLL also runs Red Hat
Linux with Apache as the Web server,IP
tables for firewall, BIND (Berkeley
Internet Name Domain) for DNS servers
and Sendmail as mail server.
Network servers at the head office and
branch offices are smaller Linux boxes
with optimum configuration running IP
tables for firewall and routing, Sendmail
for e-mail and Squid as the Proxy Server.
All user desktop runs flavors of Red
Hat Linux or Fedora Core. Each desktop
is equipped with packages like
OpenOffice for word processing, spread-
sheet, presentation tools, etc.
Deployment Challenges
"We started with a team of 4 IT personnel to manage
20 PCs running Windows OS.Today we have 1150 PCs
running Linux with the same number of IT personnel"
Inventory System with
customers integrated into the
ERP at OLL
Outsourcing facility for
customers payment realization
Web based status report
system with accurate real time
information using state-of-the-
art vehicle tracking system
across the country
Sales Force Management System
Time Management System (use
of Mobile devices)
Incentive Planning System
Online Warehouse Management
System
Human Resource Management
System
Workforce Mobilization B2B and B2C Activities

1 O C TO B E R , 2 0 0 5 T H E C TO F O R U M 7 9
Linux deployment at OLL was not withut
challenges. During the deployment of
Linux, S K Goel, while expressing deep
content with the deployment process
said, "We never thought this would be
done so easily, at least technically.The
only few problems we faced during the
process were political and with
human resource."
OLL started off by converting all the
servers to Linux and then the IT depart-
ment migrated to Linux. They planned
the migration process in stages, starting
with non-critical users, climbing up to
users with more functionality with
respect to computer usage.
The major problem faced was resist-
ance from the users. "Why do you want
me to use something that I neither know
about, nor comfortable with ", was a
regular hearing from the users. "We had
to use force by not providing complete
support for the Windows users and not
guaranteeing the data security for them,"
says Goel. The fear of losing productivi-
ty during the migration process was a
challenge to the IT team.
"We had to break the mindset of the
users without creating a human resource
breakdown and had to do this quickly
keeping the productivity of different
departments in mind," explains Goel.
"And we succeeded in doing this within a
span of six months after which users
were asking for Linux based systems,"
he added.
According to Goel, the CIOs and
CTOs were not fully aware of the power
of Linux and Open Source one major
reason for the slow adoption of Linux
and Open Source in India. Vendors will
always try to sell the licensing and sup-
port services and will not give 100 per
cent knowledge on the "Free" aspect of
Linux. GPL has been confusing point
with Open Source; people don’t under-
stand it well. Linux/Open Source con-
sultants will also not impart complete
knowledge. The reason is obviously to
make money through consultancy. So
the CIOs and CTOs need to extricate the
most out of the huge community and
educate themselves on the flexibility of
Linux and Open Source.
Initially,theIT team had to acquire the
knowledge of deployment, maintenance,
training of the "disruptive technology".
Training of the IT team itself was a chal-
lenge. OLL used the help of consultants
and training arms of Linux/OSS firms.
This didn’t prove useful for the firm and
they had to do the task themselves. At
that time, back in 2001, the knowledge
of Linux/OSS was limited in India and
even consultants and training centers
were not competent to handle a large-
scale deployment. Self-training and the
ability to plan a smooth, seamless migra-
tion was another challenge faced by
Goel.
For a while, small issues would create
major disruption in the business flow and
a manual system had to be created to
ease the business continuity, but created
havoc in the complete system with users
blaming the migration as the sole reason
for the same. Goel took upon this as a
challenge and used his team to create a
positive approach by rigorous training
and information exchange, incentive
plans for users coping with
the system without disruptions in
the business flow, etc. OLL had to
follow a dual approach, online and
a manual system for a few weeks to
avoid business loss.
Ninety per cent of systems had
smooth seamless migration. Only 10 per
cent had some issues such as printing
issues, driver compatibility issues etc.
Half of the compatibility issues
were solved automatically during upgra-
dation of the Linux distribution.
The printing problems were taken care
of by tweaking CUPS (Common Unix
Printing System) files.
OLL also faced licensing issues while
using Red Hat Linux on their desktops.
This problem was solved using Fedora
Core (free downloadable distribution
from Red Hat) on all user desktops.
Technology and Business Advantage
L I N U X D E P L O Y M E N T
W e had to break
the mindset of the
users without
creating a human
resource break-
down and we had to
do this quickly,
keeping
the productivity
of different

The technology advantages after te
Linux deployment at OLL created a com-
petitive edge for the company.
A team of four IT professionals main-
tains 1150 PCs and servers. Based out
of New Delhi, the IT team remotely logs
into user systems and branch servers to
solve problems.
AMC costs have reduced more than
60 per cent due to the use of Linux.
Linux crashes are nearly nil at OLL.
The mail server has not crashed in
four years.
The uptime of servers and desktop
PCs has drastically increased owing to
the stable robust environment.
The uptime of IBM X-series
Application Server is 99.99 per cent and
.01 per cent due to the changeover
of the server running RHEL 3.0 to
RHEL 4.0 AS.
As concurrent users increased, the
speed of the application remained con-
stant. The applications run much faster.
The system security has increased
exponentially after the implementation of
Linux. Linux has very less known viruses
(5 to be exact) versus thousands on
W indows (50,000+ viruses). Since 2001,
there has never been an intrusion or
hacking problem, according to Goel.
Since the migration, the IT team
claims that they have guaranteed data
security to all users. Using SCP, the
backups are seamless and secure.
"We have been able to achieve
tremendous growth due to the advan-
tages of providing a stable, customer-
friendly environment and accurate real-
time information to our customers. Our
growth rate post 2001 has been 100 per
cent to 110 per cent. The chart can
be seen above.
Due to ease of scaling up the system
we have been growing (no of branches)
at the rate of 40 per cent - 50 per cent
every year," says Tarun Pant.
S K Goel says, "We have devised
an innovative way of tracking vehicles
and cargo on a real-time basis using
mobile phones.
According to Goel, what they do is
capture the location string appearing on
the mobile device and update the server
at regular intervals. When a customer
sends and SMS to our hotline, this trig-
gers a query to the server and sends an
SMS back to the customer with the exact
location of the cargo (such as place, dis-
trict,state, etc) with the time of the data
capture usually within an interval of 15
minutes. And thus providing real-time
accurate information of cargo move-
ments across the nation to all cus-
tomers.
The tracking system is also Web-
enabled to assist customers to make
instant business decisions due to accu-
rate information from the Logistics arm.
This has given an edge to OLL in helping
them increase their customer base and
market share across verticals. CTOF
Millions Saved
Desktops and Servers:
1150 Desktop OS 1150 x Rs 4000/- = Rs 4.6 million
1150 Office Suite 1150 x 15000/- = Rs 17.25 million
230 Servers OS 230 x 40000/- = Rs 9.2 million
Total = Rs 31.05 million
Recurring Bandwidth Cost: Present monthly bandwidth budget is Rs 0.7 mil-
lion p/m and in event of the same being run on Windows, it would have been
1.75 million p/m. Savings: Rs 12.6 million per annum.
IT manpower cost: With the present setup, four IT professionals manage the
entire servers and desktops. Using Windows, the same would require a mini-
mum manpower of 50 IT experts. Savings: Rs 11.04 million per annum (Approx
CTC per professional - Rs 0.24 million per annum)
Anti Virus cost: Rs 1.38 million per annum (assuming Anti Virus cost @ Rs
1,000 per annum for 1,380 systems)
Savings: Rs 1.38 million per annum
Total cost saving per annum - 56.07 million per annum
Year Turnover (in Crores)
2000 - 2001 35
2001 - 2002 60
2002 - 2003 118
2003 - 2004 180
2004 - 2005 220
Growth

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