Who Made My Trip?

face="Times New Roman, serif">MAKEMYTRIP.COM

size="3">Founded
in 2000, MakeMyTrip.com is one of India's leading online travel
companies. After consolidating its position in the market as a
recognized brand, MakeMyTrip followed its success in the US by
launching its India operations in 2005. With the foresight to seize
the opportunities in the domestic travel market, brought on by a slew
of new airlines, the company offered travelers the convenience of
online travel bookings at rock-bottom prices. Rapidly, MakeMyTrip
became the preferred choice of millions of travelers who were
delighted to be empowered by few mouse clicks. Remaining reliable,
efficient and at the forefront of technology, the company's
commitment and customer-centricity allows it to better understand its
customers' diverse needs and wants, and deliver consistently. With
dedicated 24x7 customer support and offices in more than 20 cities
across India and presence in international locations, it has evolved
as one of the most trusted travel brands with cutting edge technology
advances and upgradations.

size="3">MICRO
CLINIC

size="3">Delhi-based
Micro Clinic is one of the leading solution providers and system
integration companies. It offers an array of solutions around
infrastructure management, storage and security, as well as voice,
data and video to a number of clients in the enterprise and
government sectors, besides others. Aditya Birla Group, Daikin,
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Department of Commerce are just
a few among them. With technical expertise and post-implementation
support, the company has set a benchmark during the course of few
years. Micro Clinic offers technology implementation around servers,
routers, switches, firewalls and cabling infrastructure.

size="3">NEED
FOR A SOLUTION

size="3">MakeMyTrip.com
was growing through transformation in tandem with fierce market
competition. Being a technology-backed website, the company was
scaling rapidly in terms of the number of hits and consistent need
for greater uptime. The website was running on Microsoft platform and
was looking for scalability. Therefore, the travel services major
decided for a complete overhaul of its website, and started to shift
to open-source technologies to add scalability and usability. For
this, the company required servers that could take up IT
challenges,keeping future in mind.

size="3">THE
PROCESS CALLED 'DEPLOYMENT'

size="3">For
Micro Clinic, it was not just another customer. Implementation at
country's leading e-commerce website that attracts heavy Web
traffic was quite challenging, though it was aware of the development
work that was being carried out at the customer's end. The company
could have delivered the regular order for rack servers within a few
days. “MakeMyTrip.com was a loyal customer and our technical team
was well aware of their future IT roadmap. Hence we, suggested a
blade center solution,” said Tarun Seth, MD, Micro Clinic India.
The company suggested HP blade solution, but the management at
MakeMyTrip.com closely looked at other vendors to draw product
comparisons, apart from price factor. For almost a month, there were
a series of technical meetings, discussions and deliberations between
the customer and the teams of HP and Micro Clinic. Certified
professionals were assigned for site analysis, blade designing,
connectivity to network, and other technical specifications by HP and
Micro Clinic teams. Rajesh Dalal, Assistant VP-Technology,
MakeMyTrip.com said that, the data explosion versus quick uptime or
scalability factor was an important issue, and they had to be sure of
a futuristic solution to handle the surge in Internet traffic. “It
was a challenge of sorts to adjust to the new technology wherein
Micro Clinic and HP went an extra mile to convince the long-term
benefits of the blade architecture,” Dalal said.

size="3">THE
FINAL SOLUTION

“ size="3">The
MakeMyTrip.com team monitored closely the solution offered by HP and
Micro Clinic. Since, blade was the new technology for their IT
infrastructure; the company carefully observed the technology and
market trends around implementation. We selected the best solution as
we have a keen eye on new vendors and solutions in the market,”
said Dalal. According to Seth, when a customer does a competitive
analysis, one always pitches new features of a product that the
competitor does not have. “Finally HP made way into one of the
country's largest e-commerce companies. This choice was based
purely on technology,” Dalal admitted. He pointed out the fact that
normally other vendors do not provide hot plug hard drives, which HP
offered. In addition, according to him, the redundancy built on HP
was apparently better. According to Dalal, half-height blades of HP
with double density and half-rack space was another differentiator.
The HP servers at the customer end were supplied and serviced by
Micro Clinic. With a large set of blade centers, after-sales support
and servicing were some of the key differentiators of HP's
offering, besides pricing.

size="3">THE
END RESULT

size="3">Now,
MakeMyTrip.com delivers an uptime of 99.99 percent and is highly
capable of handling up to 1.5 lakh hits per day. Blade servers need
lower costs and deliver more performance; therefore IT managers see
it as a facilitator for more computing power. With high uptime and
exceptionally good performance, the company's IT team also decided
to deploy HP blade center solution across their datacenters at VSNL,
Delhi and Netmagic, Mumbai.