This week’s Emerging Game Changer is Srei Infrastructure Finance Limited, a company that is involved in infrastructure financing in India. In over 23 years of operation, Srei has empowered more than 30,000 entrepreneurs in the infrastructure sector, through infrastructure project finance, advisory and development, infrastructure equipment finance, venture capital, capital market and insurance broking.
Srei is amongst the first Indian NBFCs to access the international market for funds; the first Indian infrastructure NBFC to be listed on the London Stock Exchange; and the first company to lay the ground for passive telecom infrastructure in India. They are also among the first to break new ground in rural IT infrastructure in India, under the National e-Governance Plan of the Government of India. Their project called Srei Sahaj e-Village, envisages creating over 26,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) in six states, offering B2B, B2C, G2C and e-Learning services to a 30 crore rural population. Srei has a pan-India presence with a network of 85 offices.
To support the company on its IT requirements, SREI have two ERP solutions from SAP and Sunguard deployed across the various group companies. An inhouse Lotus Notes mailing solution takes care of the mailing requirement of the organization. Some custom developed applications on .NET are also part of the IT framework. Servers of IBM and Dell are deployed in their data centre in Kolkata and their backup centre in Delhi.
The person on top of IT at Srei is Somak Shome, their Vice President of IT Security – he is responsible for all the tech requirements at Srei. He is assisted by 60 people in the IT team, who together take care of all the desktop, laptop and mobile solutions for the 3,000 employees across 20-25 group companies of Srei. “As a user driven organization IT at Srei is constantly evolving to meet the various needs of organization. Mobility is a big demand, because many people are always on road. Automation is a demand and there are demands of data backup as well,” explains Somak.
Srei utilizes two solutions of Symantec – Symantec endpoint protection, which has been in use for last 5-6 years across all desktops and laptops in the company. They recently also purchased Symantec DLO, a data backup software for certain high profile users in the company. Srei is quite happy with Symantec and constantly upgrades to newer versions of their products.
However Somak has two pieces of advice for Symantec. “As the IT environment around the world is evolving, Symantec should also evolve to offer SaaS as solutions. Symantec should also offer a single management suite for products, so that I can manage all my products from a single place. So if I have multiple products, then I shouldn’t have to use Symantec for something, ABC for something else and so on. Instead I should have a single console to manage all the three,” opines Somak.