Kale Consultants integrates enterprise messaging & collaboration with Sify's Innerspace

Kale Consultants Ltd. is India's leading developer of software products for the airline and banking industries. Leveraging three strategically located development centers in India, it is a global organization with over 600 professionals, six international offices and customers in more than thirty countries. An end-to-end solutions provider, Kale offers Business Process Outsourcing services, bespoke applications development, application management, re-engineering and consultancy services. It also offers cutting edge product solutions for the airlines, banking and healthcare industries.

Kale's Requirements

Being a multi-locational enterprise in a manpower and knowledge-intensive business with global offices and high levels of intra-office and intra-departmental coordination, Kale's business relied greatly on its messaging and collaboration infrastructure. Kale's priorities were to :

"We were facing a situation where as a growing organization, people to people communications was getting difficult and slow. Our intra-office communications costs were rising while collaboration between teams was not as efficient as we'd like it to be" explains Vinay Nair, Manager - Network & Systems, Kale Consultants Limited.

"For key projects, skill identification was becoming a bottleneck and knowledge sharing so essential for a business like ours, was minimal. We were looking at a system where mail, chat, conferencing and other colloboration tools like document management and discussion boards could be offered to employees in an integrated, single platform" Vinay elaborates.

The Sify solution

Sify's Enterprise Applications group architected and built a solution that met Kale's requirements. The solution essentially delivers an enterprise-class Intranet with integrated components to facilitate document management, workflows, real-time collaboration, messaging and workgroup creation.

Sify's solution built around it's Innerspace knowledge management platform allows Kale employees to access their mail, chat and web-conferencing applications as well as discussion forums, document management and other Intranet and workflow tools using a unique, single-signon (SSO) facility. Kale employees now need just a single User ID/ Password to access all these applications over an integrated web-browser interface. Kale's existing mail system as well as Sify's ExpressMeet multimedia web-conferencing system are integrated into the Innerspace's Intranet application.

Form-based workflow tools facilitate faster administrative processes such as leave approvals, resource requests and approvals for pricing, proposals and other documents. The solution also builds in administrative tools to define and restrict employee access to certain applications and resources based on job definitions and needs.

For instance, not everyone may be allowed access to the ExpressMeet web-conferencing facility or certain documents available on the Intranet. According to Vinay, the single platform system positively impacts productivity and also makes the adoption process easier. "What we have now, is a single operating platform for all our company's messaging and collaboration needs. Instead of logging into disparate applications such as mail and conferencing, our employees can now access all authorized applications over a single-window interface" explains Vinay.

For the final touch of personalization, the integrated offering was customized to suit some specific requirements of Kale such as look and feel, placement of controls and other user interface components.

For details on Sify's Innerspace and ExpressMeet solutions, write-in to esbmarketing@sifycorp.com.