SAP ACE Award 2014 Recognizes Indian Pillars

In recognition of India Public Services sector in driving excellence and innovation using information technology, to improve the lives of people and deliver better, more effective government, SAP today felicitated 16 Indian enterprises with the SAP Awards for Customer Excellence (ACE) for being at the forefront. The awards were presented at the eight SAP ACE Award ceremony held at JW Marriot in New Delhi, India.

The SAP ACE 2014 for Public Services award categories included Utilities, HR & Payroll, Mobility, Procurement, Finance, Urban local bodies, Innovation and Database computing. SAP also gave special recognition awards to customers using SAP solutions in an innovative way and customers to highlight their achievements attained with the power of cloud technology. The award honoured Indian public services organisations that became the differentiator in improving people’s lives and help urban governments to be best run governments and to help cities contribute to a better run country.

“SAP ACE awards echoes our commitment and vigour to enable Government and Public Services Companies to run better,” Ravi Chauhan, Managing Director, SAP India & Subcontinent. “SAP ACE is a recognition to honour all government organizations who have used SAP technology for good governance, user empowerment, improved transparency and deliver better citizen services and hence improve lives in India.”

Having become a unique and proud legacy of SAP Indian Subcontinent, ACE, over the years, has become a hallmark of our customers’ vision and commitment. The event witnessed an exceptional participation with  a total of 47 nominations across 12 different categories.

As part of the diligent and impartial process, the assessment involved thorough evaluation of front running nominees by an eminent jury. The jury panel included Renu Budhiraja, Sr. Director, e-Governance Department of Electronics & Information Technology ,Government of India, Prem Narayan, Director (Foreign Procurement), Ministry of Railways,  Government of India, A S Bhal, Economic Adviser, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, Mr. Y. M Gadkari ,  Chief General Manager (IT), Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited, Mumbai, Maharashtra, and M.P.Gupta, PhD Professor,  & Chair-Informations Systems & E-gov, Department of Management Studies, IIT Delhi.    

Shaadi.com Hosts Over 30m Users With Rackspace

Rackspace, a leading Managed Cloud company, has announced Shaadi.com, the world’s largest matrimonial website is using Rackspace dedicated hosting. Based in India, Shaadi.com manages over 200 million page views per month and over 10,000 registrations daily. 

 Beginning with one Rackspace server in 1998, Shaadi.com has grown exponentially since its initial deployment. Sixteen years ago, Shaadi.com saw an opportunity to build the world’s largest online matrimonial site and create an online experience that would match and heighten the traditional dating experience in India.

Today, 30 million people use Shaadi.com, 3.2 million members have found their matches through the site and the company has built over 100 matchmaking centres across 87 cities in India. 

 “When starting out as an online startup, it was critical that we found a technology partner that allowed us to keep IT costs to a minimum, while also providing the right IT infrastructure to meet our growing needs,” said Anand Mittal, COO & director, Shaadi.com. “We needed to find a partner that could help us build a premium online experience for our customers – one that could accommodate millions of customers and scale as demand grew.”

 To meet this challenge, Shaadi.com turned to Rackspace for its high-performance dedicated servers, which provide the processing speed required to help meet daily business needs. With Shaadi.com running millions of daily, complex personalized searches serving millions of users on the site, Shaadi.com needed industry-leading, expertise and superb performance to manage this heavy compute burden, which takes up vast amounts of power.

With Rackspace’s powerful cloud services systems in place, Shaadi.com only uses 30 servers to run complex searches and successfully match users. This has resulted in significant cost savings for the company.  

 “Since day one, Rackspace dedicated hosting and cloud computing services have been a critical component to the growth and success of our business,” said Mittal.  “Any downtime of our website is detrimental to our business, as it impacts our brand image and damages customer loyalty. To be successful and gain the trust of our customers, we consistently need to deliver a seamless experience and make sure they are happy. Rackspace enables us to do that.” 

While reliability and scalability initially attracted Shaadi.com to Rackspace, Fanatical Support is what made the company a satisfied customer for almost two decades. 

“Rackspace’s real-time and round-the-clock IT expertise and relentless customer support has been critical to the success of our business,” added Mittal. “Because of Fanatical Support, we can focus on our core business as opposed to dealing with server and network problems.” 

“With Shaadi.com’s rapid expansion and global growth, it was important that the company had dedicated infrastructure for managing day-to-day traffic as well as traffic spikes during growth spurts and peak traffic times,” said Ajit Melarkode, managing director, Rackspace Asia-Pacific. “What’s more is that Shaadi.com also has 24/7 support to help and guide at any time, day or night, a critical component to the overall success of the company.” 

 With Rackspace support, the site has been recognized for countless website awards, including; ‘Most Innovative Company in India of 2011’ by Fast Company, USA, ‘The Best Matrimonial Site’ by About.com’s Reader’s Choice and ‘Most User Friendly Website’ and ‘Most Preferred Online Matchmaking Brand’ by Juxt Consult. 

10,000 Microsoft Partners Will Help Move To Cloud

SMBs in India will now be able to purchase Microsoft Azure cloud platform from their local IT partner.  Microsoft has made this possible by making Azure available in the open licensing catalogue for India.  SMBs in India rely on products available with their local IT partner in open licensing catalogue to fulfil their IT needs.  With the inclusion of Azure, SMBs will now be able to procure their entire IT portfolio from a single Microsoft partner of their choice. 

 Cloud is a great way for SMBs to enhance their business efficiency with minimal expenditure on IT.  Microsoft makes available the most comprehensive portfolio of enterprise-grade cloud services preparing them to compete with the best across the world.  Office 365 is already available in the open catalogue.  With the addition of Azure, SMBs will be able to quickly build and deploy applications at reduced costs with flexible monetary terms and achieve faster return on investment.   

 Earlier customers could purchase Azure either directly from www.azure.microsoft.com or as part of an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft.  While these options would continue, SMBs are likely to leverage their existing partners to procure Azure.

“Over the years, our customers have been able to adopt and benefit from new technologies though the support of our 10,000 strong partner network. By making Azure available through local partners, we are further helping India’s SMBs secure the great benefits of cloud computing”, said Meetul Patel, General Manager, Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners, India. 

“Availability of Microsoft Azure through the partner channel will bring cloud services to lakhs of SMBs in India.  It will also help partners scale to a higher engagement with these customers.” said Nagaraj, Executive Director, Quadra Systems, a Microsoft partner based out of Bangalore, Karnataka. 

“Azure will make our cloud portfolio comprehensive and help make our customers more efficient.  It will allow us to work closely with them to solve their business challenges.” said, Kothandaraman R., MD, Katpro Technologies, a Microsoft partner based out of Bangalore, Karnataka.   

Microsoft is continuing to enable SMB customers and partners to embrace cloud as the preferred mode for deployment of IT.  Azure further incentivizes partners to ‘do more’ for SMBs. It will help them deepen the engagement with customers in identifying and supporting IT usage through Azure.  Partners will also be able to strengthen their revenue stream while working closely with customers.  

Nike & Juniper To Build Data Centre Cloud Network

Juniper Networks. a leading player in network innovation, has announced that NIKE, Inc., the global leader in athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories, has agreed to work with Juniper to co-create a new highly scalable next-generation data centre cloud and retail network infrastructure.

As part of its ongoing work to meet the changing needs of its business and customers globally, NIKE intends to deploy key components of Juniper Networks MetaFabric architecture to support current and future business goals. Additionally, MetaFabric will serve as the basis for virtualizing multiple NIKE data centers around the world.

 Through the open standards-based architecture of MetaFabric, comprised of proven routing, switching, security, management and orchestration solutions, NIKE can expect to realize improved application performance across the company as well as advanced network orchestration via automation and data analytics. 

 Juniper Networks will work with NIKE to provide:

* A carrier-class, ultra-scalable, secure network architecture, providing a foundation upon which to virtualize multiple NIKE data centers globally.

* Advanced orchestration via automation, management and data analytics across all domains

* Co-creation on future developments for NIKE’s network