Air Works Overview

“We have recently initiated our co-creation and innovation journey with PC Solutions, starting our journey with Microsoft Windows Azure as a fundamental platform to build our App Market Place.”

~ Ravinder Pal Singh,Group Chief Information and Technology Officer, Air Works

Business Situation

Air Works is India’s largest independent aviation MRO and India’s first EASA certified MRO. The company is certified to maintain 50 different types of aircraft – ranging from small, single engine machines to turboprops plus B737s and A320s. Air Works includes Air Livery, UK which is Europe’s leading independent aircraft painting and re-finishing company and Empire Aviation Group, Dubai which is the Middle East’s largest aircraft management services company. Hence, there has been a constant increase in the aircraft maintenance data digitization and automation. To cater to this there was also a need for a highly flexible and automated backend infrastructure supporting the applications that were being developed and deployed by Air Works.

Apart from these transactional and environmental issues affecting the user experience, there was also no specific HA or DR managed for the applications running in the organizations. As a part of the next steps Air Works was looking for a cloud solution which would meet these requirements for the migration of their applications and development of their new applications on the same line.

Partnership in Co-creation and Innovation

Air Works is growing as an organization and their needs for digitization and automation are growing in leaps and bounds hence they have chosen Windows Azure as a growth platform and PC Solutions as a strategic partner to plan and implement their cloud adoption and migration strategy. Together Air Works with PC Solutions have successfully developed and deployed four business critical applications and have planned for many more apps in the near future.

Solution

PC Solutions had reached out to Air Works and gave a presentation on overview of Microsoft Windows Azure offerings and the professional capabilities of the company as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. By discussion, it was established that it was a good opportunity to migrate/develop a cloud based solution to meet the business requirements.

Air Works and PC Solutions entered into a strategic partnership to meet the growing business needs of the company with a balance between capacity and demand. Air Works had chosen Windows Azure as a growth platform to plan and implement their cloud adoption and migration strategy. Air Works together with PC Solutions had successfully developed and deployed four business-critical applications and have planned for many more apps in the near future. The solution involved three major components:

An Azure based solution with dot net based application running on the Cloud Services, SQL Azure, and Blob Storage.
The backend administration portal developed for the on-premise administrators to manage access to the platform with rights to add, edit and modify users with selective rights and accesses.
The user portal where the users can log in and access the applications: an application was developed by Air Works to automate the billing. The manpower efforts were tracked, monitored and integrated with the invoicing system to automate generation of invoices. This process had also been integrated with their existing ERP solution and tracks the end-to-end lifecycle of a work order. This application added a lot of value for the Air Works Finance team and helped generate considerable additional revenue.

Apart from this, we had migrated all the applications to ensure the high availability. The inherent disaster recovery features of Azure (like Geo-replication and uptime SLA guarantee) also ensure optimum availability of data and application with enhanced user delight.

Teams from different offices now work together with ease, access data, documents, and collaborate the data from anywhere, and, are confident of a secure business environment

The subscription based Microsoft Windows Azure provide them a platform to develop a customized tool which is meeting their requirements perfectly. At the same time, it protects business communications and sensitive information by meeting internal and regulatory compliance requirements.

Avoids Capital Investment

The Microsoft Windows Azure saves the organization from capital investment on infrastructure, hardware or software. The “Microsoft is responsible for patches, upgrades and maintenance. This minimizes administration, maintenance and hosting related resources and costs.

Assures Security and Governance

With the tool developed now the users’ authentication and authorization happens only from the office LAN premises only. Furthermore the login and IP are being tracked with the logs of the activities done by each users which helps in managing and maintaining the whole portal by the Administrators, Along with the same there is user, creation, provisioning, de-provisioning and modifying which can be done through the portal.

Improves Collaboration, Productivity

With this solution Microsoft is responsible for patches, upgrades and maintenance of the data center and PC Solutions for the administration, maintenance and hosting related resource management. This reduces the effort being invested by the Air Works team in managing the same. Online presence of real time data and the ability to collaborate with proper security, minimizes delays over important decisions and ensures higher productivity.

Reduces Back up and Storage Risks

With real-time communication, Hero MotoCorp has gained significantly on reliability factor as Microsoft Windows Azure is always available while service level agreement guarantees 99.99 percent uptime, thus resolving unreliability issues. PC Solutions has also been a very active partner in being there to address issues in case any come up in the functionality of the system.

Configuration Management

As a part of the solution we had developed a centralized configuration management on the cloud storage concept which was used to maintain the various versions of the code deployed and to track the changes implemented by the team. This helped in having a backup of the code and also helped in case of any roll-back and disaster scenario.

Our Clients Love Our Service

I truly believe our partnership with PC Solutions has paid off well. We thank them for helping us drive the change by means of training, deployment, specialized sessions and in a way enabled us fast track how users could adopt technology.

PC Solutions made sure that whatever commitments they have made and even if certain things were not thought of, they actually took the hit and negotiated with Microsoft and ensured that our project was migrated successfully.