Connecting IMI for the future

The Client

Nestled in Qutab Institutional Area,
International Management Institute (IMI), New Delhi was established
in 1981 in collaboration with IMI Geneva (now IMD, Lausanne). IMI is
India's first corporate sponsored business school with sponsorship
from corporate houses like RPG Enterprises, Nestle, ITC, SAIL, Tata
Chemicals, BOC and Williamson Magor and other prominent enterprises.
Over a period of 28 years, the Institute has claimed to have acquired
global status, receiving UNDP assistance for promoting
internationally oriented management education. Besides this, it has
also various other international linkage with bodies like World Bank,
UNDP, ILO, UNCTAD, Asian Productivity Organization and others.

Besides its location at the capital of
India, IMI has also come up with a facility in Kolkata and will be
shortly launching its premier session this CY in Bhubaneswar. Coming
up with an entirely new campus in the capital of Orissa, the IT
infrastructure of the institute needed a fresh start with IMI,
floating multiple tenders for solutions and supply of its IT
equipments.

Need for a Solution

In June, 2010, the institute floated a
network laying tender for the new campus requiring a holistic passive
component structure in place. Speaking over the networking needs,
Dinesh Sharma, manager-systems, IMI said, “Network is the backbone
to any set-up, either intranet or Internet and this accounts for the
major set-up plan for the new establishment.”

Solution Provider : Epitome
Convergent Networks

The tender was bagged by Kolkata-based
Epitome Convergent Networks (ECN), a new company born last year to
lay the complete cabling needs of IMI. Spread across nearly 2 km
across 6 blocks, the cabling solution is valued at Rs 30 lakh for the
passive components alone.

The Solution

Speaking over the present deployment,
Rajarshi Ghosh of ECN said, “There are a few positive factors when
considering a new deployment. First of all, as there is no current
set-up, it gives us the much needed liberty to modify and customize
the solution according to the needs to make the customer happy. In
the second place, the laying part can be done at ease as there is not
much hassle in the overlay part.”

Shortly after bagging the contract, ECN
rushed a team of 4 members to deploy the cables using UDP CAT 6.0 and
CAT 5e product line. “The primary need for us was to have a good
and effective set-up to provide seamless voice and data transfers
across all blocks and platforms. Hence, we preferred to use CAT 6.0
and 5e layout,” Sharma added.

However, realizing the needs of IMI,
ECN outsourced the laying manpower procurement and functions to
Kolkata-based Akash Udyog which again sent a team of 12 personnel to
manually lay the cables. “ECN was focused over providing the
solution, testing and analyzing the deployment. We have a balanced
manpower in our company, out of which most are technical personnel in
testing, support and solutions. Hence, we were left with a few ground
engineers. As a natural alternative, we thought it would be best to
outsource to Akash Udyog.”

Speaking over its preference for ECN to
deploy passive components in the networking project, Sharma added,
“ECN is well known in the eastern region and has an able team of
technical personnel. Also, with their proposal meeting, our criteria
and their product line, we preferred to give the contract to ECN.”

The entire cabling deployment is done
using products from Tyco Electronics (TE). ECN used a mix of TE
products to offer the solution to IMI encompassing fiber optics, CAT
and assemblies. With performance featuring on top of the customer
wish-list, ECN focused on using SPEC 44 wires which are dual wall
constructed radiation cross-linked polyalkene with the mechanical and
chemical properties of radiation cross-linked polyvinylidene fluoride
(PVF2). Also, the range of SPEC 55 wire is insulated with modified
radiation cross-linked ETFE polymer.

Further, the Tyco UTP CAT 6 cables is
said to be exceeding the proposed TIA requirements for Category 6
performance. They comply with all of the performance requirements for
current and proposed applications such as Gigabit Ethernet,
100BaseTX, token ring, 155 Mbps ATM, 100 Mbps TP-PMD, ISDN, analog
(broadband, base-band) and digital video and voice.

The Result

IMI is now planning to go for Wi-Fi
network and is considering video surveillance and CCTV implementation
also. “We are very satisfied with the present state of the affairs
in the upcoming campus (Bhubaneswar). ECN is doing a wonderful job
and its deployment team is excellent in terms of understanding
technology and offering flexible solutions at crucial hours. With the
network testing and slither expected to be over by mid-April, we may
go for Wi-Fi depending on the working bandwidth available,” Sharma
concluded.

Project
driven by: Avishek Rakshit