HERO Overview

“The Azure solution customized by PC Solutions has helped us collaborate across geographical boundaries with ease and flexibility. The worries regarding security and availability of information have been dealt with by the solution.”

~ Vijay Sethi, Vice President & CIO, Hero MotoCorp Ltd

Business Situation

There are many technical and design teams of Hero MotoCorp with bases out of Europe, North America and India. These teams have to work in coherence on various assignments sharing the progress of work with the other teams. While collaborating with each other, care was to be taken that there was no potential threat to the Intellectual Property being developed while sharing it. Hero MotoCorp was earlier using a cloud solution which posed a lot of security and tracking challenges during collaboration. To cater to these challenges, Hero MotoCorp developed a solution based on the Microsoft Azure platform with the assistance of PC Solutions which resulted in a reliable, secure platform where storage, service support and security issues have been taken care of as per their business requirements.

Hero MotoCorp Ltd. (formerly Hero Honda Motors Ltd.) is the world’s largest manufacturer of two – wheelers for the last 12 years in a row. The company sells more than 6 million two wheelers in a year and has huge focus on operational efficiencies and customer relationships. Hero MotoCorp Ltd. has a very strong IT base and is a pioneer in adopting leading edge technologies.

The Organization had a decentralized team working from various geographical locations and they were already using a cloud solution which was posing a lot of challenges in terms of security and tracking of the data being shared. Along with the implementation partner, PC Solutions, they developed a solution on Microsoft Windows Azure platform which provided them with a reliable, secure platform where storage, service support and security suited their business requirements.

Solution

Hero MotoCorp evaluated the offerings & capabilities of the Azure platform and involved PC Solutions Pvt Ltd. because of their professional capabilities on the platform being aMicrosoft Gold Certified Partner. Through discussions, it was realized that a customized solution could be built using the Azure platform which suited the business requirements for collaboration keeping in mind the various concerns for granularity, security and availability.

PC Solutions along with the Hero MotoCorp team did a deep dive envisioning and planning to design a solution based on the understanding of their business needs and challenges. The solution involves three major components:

The 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 upload, download and share their documents with their counterparts. An IP based security was enabled on the application to ensure that the users could not access the same from outside the office premises. The other aspect was the close integration of the platform with emails alerts and detailed activity logging by all the users on the platform. Hero MotoCorp also signed the Azure Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft as a strategic decision to move to the Azure Cloud.

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

The subscription based Microsoft Windows Azure provides them a platform to develop customized tools to meet the needs as desired, and also at the same time protect business communications and sensitive information as required by internal and regulatory compliance.

Avoids Capital Investment

The Microsoft Windows Azure saves the organization from capital investment on infrastructure, hardware or software. The hosted platform helps in reducing Capital Expenses on servers and storage. “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 when accessed from the office premises. Furthermore the login and IP are being tracked with the logs of the activities done by each user which helps in managing and maintaining the whole portal by the Administrators.Besides this, there is user creation, provisioning, de-provisioning and modifying capabilities 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 Hero MotoCorp 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.

Guarantees 99.99% Uptime

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.

Reduces Back up and Storage Risks

There is built in Disaster recovery and geo replication that is available with Microsoft Windows Azure. It ensures that there is no data loss on the cloud from the data center even in the case of any physical issues at the datacenter. Hence there is no need to take manual backups and maintain on-premise storage of the data that is already being replicated on the Azure Cloud.

Our Clients Love Our Service

We have had a long association with PC Solutions and they have done credible work in serving our internal customers.

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.

We launched our application in the form of portal with the help of PC Solutions and it takes care of 70% of our business through automation.

The application implemented by PC Solutions provides end-to-end value chain of aviation maintenance of private jets.

PC Solutions’s customer-centric approach has helped us add value to our enterprise.

PC Solutions has provided us flexible and scalable solutions and given us the independence to make changes in the system as desired.

PC Solutions has been very responsive to our requests and their ability to instantly resolve our abrupt requirements shows how customer-focused and professional they are.