Opening Up The Minds

There is no denying that it’s the efforts of CIOs and IT administrators that brought the open source to the mainstream. However, for most Open Source project, it’s inevitable for a CIO to talk the language of management and convince them about why the company should go for Open Source. In ING Life’s case, it wasn’t an easy task for Ravishankar Subramanian, Director-IT and Corporate Services, to get a ‘go ahead’ from the top management. The top management of ING Life actually thought that Open Source would disrupt the business!

Even as the idea germinated in his mind, he knew that migrating all the company’s Windows XP desktops, its WS 2003 servers and ING Life’s core applications to Open Source would be a large-scale change initiative. He was also acutely aware that nobody in the ING Group had ever attempted something as radical and that if he wanted to do this he would need to make an air-tight case to the senior management of the group in Hong Kong.

Subramanian was certain the management would first want to know if less extreme options had been covered. So he approached Microsoft for a more cost-effective solution. According to Subramanian, Microsoft lowered its cost by 20 percent by reducing the number of components it offered. That’s when he decided to present a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) plan to the senior brass in Hong Kong. His case was built on three pillars: growth, cost and savings.

What really acted as a counterbalance to management’s doubts was this: The strategy would cut the IT cost of a new branch by 25 % and bring the total cost of setting up a new branch by 5 %. It would also reduce the Rs 85,000 ING Life was paying Microsoft for every PC running Windows XP over a six-year period. The potential savings piqued the management’s interest and they decided to send a risk assessment team to study the proposal. “This gave with me the confidence that I could indeed pull this off,” concludes Subramanian.

User adoption has traditionally been a stumbling block for Open Source.  According to North Bridge Venture Partners’ 2009 Future of Open Source Survey, “unfamiliarity with Open Source software” was one of the five barriers enterprises cited to Open Source adoption. That said, there are enterprises that have embraced Open Source and achieved enormous benefits. ING Life is just one among them. Open Source helped the company to save over Rs 8 crore and funded its expansion plans.

Competition in India’s life insurance business is fierce. According to India’s Insurance Regulatory Development Authority, only two of the country’s 20-odd insurance players have broken even.

ING Life isn’t one of the two. Which is why, like most of its competition, the company has been consistently trying to expand its network. And rural India, with its lower insurance penetration, is where everyone’s headed. Also, competition in the rural hinterlands is low compared to the metros where all players exercise their muscle. The Bangalore-based ING Life has a network of 265 offices spread out over 234 cities and towns. But that’s still a far cry from ICICI Prudential Life Insurance’s 2,100 branches (which also began operation about eight years ago).
The problem with the rural push is that it’s expensive. But the high cost of servicing these non-metro clients is not compensated because, almost counter-intuitively, insurance comes at a relatively low price. That makes rural expansion a risky business. All of which makes optimizing cost an imperative, not an option for ING Life.
Opening a Window of Opportunity

If ING Life wanted to contribute to the rural push, it knew it would have to lower the cost of setting up branches by attacking IT infrastructure. Some IT optimization had already been done. Because ING Life’s field force only spent a small fraction of their working day at the office, the company had ensured that branches pooled resources, which meant that every computer serviced every four or five sales managers. But hardware was a modest cost-reduction target and delivered short-term tactical gains. In order to achieve longer-term benefits, the company wanted to target software costs and that was they considered Linux as a cost-effective alternative.

ING Life evaluated that Open Source would help it in reducing the IT cost of a new branch by 25 % and bring the total cost of setting up a new branch by 5 percent. Going Open Source dramatically reduced the Rs 85,000 ING Life was paying Microsoft for every PC running Windows XP over a six- year period. The company started on a pilot in April 2008. ING Life’s Jayanagar branch in Bangalore was chosen as the site for a two month pilot. All of the branch’s computers were moved to SUSE Linux. The results of the pilot were encouraging because we didn’t find any surprises,” says Ravishankar Subramanian, director-IT and corporate services, ING Life.

With the success of the pilot, Subramanian felt confident of embarking on a final roll out. And he did it quickly. Between June and December of 2008, ING Life moved 1,200 of its 2,000 desktops to Open Source. “Right now SUSE Linux and Open Office are being used by 5,000 employees. That’s the magnitude of this change,” says Subramanian.

The Seethrough

Getting On With the Program

“When I first heard of the migration, I was very apprehensive. I thought the cultural shift would be very hard,” says Venkat Reddy Peddolla, deputy manager, customer service, Secunderabad, ING Life. “My biggest fear was adapting to a whole new range of changes. My level of technical expertise isn’t very high. Making adjustments to Linux was a big deal.” But the company successfully adapted to the new environment. One of the first things Subramanian did was to ensure that users, enterprise-wide, knew that management backed the Open Source push.

“The MD, Kshitij Jain, went to all the locations and talked about the benefits of this project. Similarly, Rahul Agarwal, who heads sales, and Shamit Gupta, the head of marketing, talked about the importance of getting this right. That brought about a change in perception. The senior management saw me through the project,” says Subramanian.

Subramanian used computer based training (CBT) that would get users acquainted with the new interfaces and acquire the necessary skills and expertise to handle SLED. “I even visited small sites. We offered them a carrot: We’d be able to supply them with more hardware for the same cost this way. They had a few issues but, by and large, they were willing to give it a try,” he says.  “I knew the cost involved with working on MS Office and we all understood the need to reduce that cost. I understood that it was only a matter training. The change was not as hard as I had anticipated,” says Peddolla.

The company also focused on training its employees. The 20-man project team comprised people who would form the fulcrum of the change and were trained for five months on Linux and UNIX. The company also hired an Open Source helpdesk team from an outsourcer. The hired helpdesk handled first issues and escalated more complex problems to the in-house experts.

Other user problems revolved around compatibility. “When we sent (remote offices) something from the head office which was on Window to the field which was on Linux, there were compatibility issues,” recalls Kumar. Another challenge was e-mail. Some employees who had been with the company for a long time kept their e-mails offline. “To make it work on a new e-mail front-end from Linux posed a technical challenge because of the sheer volume of the files,” says Subramanian.
For some of these issues, Subramanian went back to Novell to see how closely they could match Microsoft in terms of features. In the case of automatic archival of old e-mails, Novell gave them a solution which was close to the Microsoft way out. “They are progressively giving us upgrades closer to the Microsoft system,” says Subramanian.

Oh! For Open

The project’s success isn’t limited to happy employees. Even after adding the costs of travel and onsite support (about Rs 4 lakh) and training (about Rs 4 lakh), ING Life still saved money. At only about Rs 2,000 per SUSE license a year, it is saving Rs 43,000 on every machine over six years. Back-of-the-envelope calculations of those savings spread across 2,000 machines add up to Rs 8.6 crore over six years.
ING Life, which grew by about a 100 branches last year (up from 40 the year before) knows that it has plenty of catching up to do.

Hopefully, the monies that it saved through its ‘mission open source’ will go some distance in opening up India’s heartland for them.