Interview with Anindya Garai, Vice President, Emaar MGF Land Limited

Emaar MGF Land Limited, a joint venture between Emaar Properties PJSC of Dubai and MGF Developments Limited of India, entered the Indian real estate space in February 2005. In the past one decade, it has charted significant business growth and currently has a pan-India presence with operations spanning all key realty segments, namely the residential, commercial, retail and hospitality sectors. Growing business expansion, however, has resulted into complexity of operations and issues of coordination between various departments.
To counter these issues, the company has turned to information and technology (IT) solutions by investing significantly in IT/telecom networks and technologies to integrate departments such as sales, human resources, information technology, and finance and improve business efficiency. Further, the company has also leveraged technology to enhance customer experience. Recently, Emaar MGF Land partnered with PayUMoney to offer e-Services on its customer service portal.

Anindya Garai, Vice President, Emaar MGF Land Limited talks about the company’s present telecom and IT infrastructure and its future plans to adopt new technologies…

What are your company’s telecom and IT requirements? What are its current technology and bandwidth requirements? The company requires secured network connectivity for all locations which are convenient to the users with high performance access of enterprise applications and concept of flexibility of work from anywhere. We are currently using network firewall with IPS/IDS, anti-virus/spam control, mail services, workflow applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) along with some mobile applications which is still in pipeline. The total bandwidth across all locations of the company would be approximately 65 mbps.

What are the various LAN and WAN technologies deployed by the company at its central/branch offices and retail outlets? What has been the service experience so far?The company has deployed centralised wireless/MPLS VPN connectivity, internet, telecom and video conferencing, load balancers, etc. So far, our service experience has been good without any major outages. We have achieved an annual SLA of 99 per cent but the network availability and its stability at some of our remote and upcoming sites is still a challenge.

What are the key concerns faced by the company with respect to telecom/IT infrastructure? How are you planning to address the same?
Most of our current developments are at the peripherals of the city where network connectivity to remote sites and offices is a major challenge. We are talking to various service providers to provide VPN services through 3G network, wherein users can directly login to our corporate network. Although, it has been promised by many service providers, they have failed at the time of delivery.

Which applications have been deployed by the company? How have they helped in improving management and operational efficiencies?
We have implemented Oracle Applications R12 and IBM, Lotus Applications and almost 90 per cent of our business processes (finance, procurement, sales and post sales) is automated. None of the OEMs (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) have a complete solution to support real estate business vertical, so we have a small team of in-house developers to help, run and support the business process.

Which new products, solutions and technologies hold most relevance for your organisation? What are you future plans regarding adopting the same?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are some of the new technologies which can now actually help us to bring out the true value for our business. We are currently evaluating CRM solutions and making a value proposition for the organisation as a single OEM product to take over the custom CRM product that we have built. We are planning to start our cloud journey and would like to do a small pilot on hybrid or private cloud in the forthcoming year. In addition to this, we also have plans to move into the mobility space wherein we are planning to equip our sales and customer services so that all employees’ can access these business applications while they are on move.