In a nutshell

National Fertilizers Ltd is a government owned manufacturer of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals, with a turnover of approximately USD 1 billion. They have an HQ, a few regional offices and three factories. They needed to connect these locations and communicate and collaborate better.

Challenges, not problems

The requirement was for centralised email and Internet access controls, across all locations. The challenges were about the quality of their WAN links in remote locations where their factories were based. The basic telecom infrastructure at those locations was nothing to write home about. Gigantic chemical factories are not commonly set up in downtown urban centres, as we all know.

These locations had 2,500+ users, and the entire network needed to be managed and monitored from their HQ.

Solutions, not ideas

Our solution was a classic case of deployment of Servaya at all locations. The HQ data centre hosted the master servers, and all factories and regional offices installed slave servers. Most of the computer users were located at the HQ, and this site deployed the largest server firepower.

The unreliability of the WAN links impacted their mail flow even after Servaya was deployed, and our team re-configured email software parameters to retry more frequently and behave in a more robust manner to counteract this.

Our on-site support team travelled from location to location setting up servers, deploying services, migrating mailboxes from legacy systems to the new Servaya system, and handholding initial users.

A large amount of legacy email data of several hundred users was migrated to the new system by our team as part of the onboarding process.

Now that’s value

After our solution was deployed, NFL began to enjoy the benefit of reliable and fast email flow, superior to that of most large multi-location government-owned organisations of that period. Productivity and accountability improved. Central control of Internet access too helped by cutting down irrelevant web browsing activity and freeing up Internet link bandwidth for better performance.

Our team provided on-site and off-site support to NFL for five years after deployment, and included a full product upgrade during this period.