Essar Group is a large, Mumbai-based company with US$17 billion in revenues, operations in 25 countries, and interests in steel, energy, power, communications, shipping ports, logistics, and construction. It is also migrating toward the cloud with some of its Web-based apps with Microsoft Azure, according to company CTO Jayantha Prabhu.
«With Windows Azure, we don’t have to spend money on hardware and software, and we don’t have to spend time on administrative tasks related to infrastructure,» he says. «A scalable, well-defined platform gives us much fewer problems to solve and more time to focus on the overall experience of the application.»
Prabhu says the company “can obtain the benefits of both public and private cloud computing” with Azure, providing on-demand computing and storage when needed through Microsoft datacenters.
Essar has been working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner MindTree to migrate four of its apps – reporting, visitor-management, and gate-pass systems – and values the flexibility it says it’s gained along with “a lower total cost of ownership compared with an on-premises solution,» according to Prabhu.