Fabindia employs SQL Server to integrate POS and save money

Fabindia deployed SQL Server to integrate all of its POS systems and to save money, the latter being the more important criteria. By Pupul Dutta

India’s leading retail chain, Fabindia, which boasts of goods made using traditional techniques, wanted to upgrade its IT infrastructure. The retailer needed better tools for integrating, processing, and analyzing its growing data stores. To this end, it deployed Microsoft SQL Server.

Saurabh Rajpal, CTO, Fabindia Overseas Pvt Ltd, said, “Prior to the implementation of SQL Server, we were on a database where costs and limitations in technology, etc were impediments to growth. In terms of scalability, cost per location and sheer performance, we were facing a crunch. The only way to scale the original solution was to buy more licenses.”

With SQL Server, the retailer did not face any such problem and the performance has improved. “We don’t see that kind of a performance crunch and are happy with the solution,” said Rajpal.

He added, “The hardware requirements have gone down by almost 40%. We saved substantially on licensing and this allowed us to put in loads of infrastructure. We are doing research and deploying SSDs.”

Srikanth Karnakota, Director Server & Cloud Business, Microsoft, explained that Fabindia’s biggest need was to integrate all of its points of sale and consume business intelligence in its purest form. “One of the massive tasks was the end-to-end integration of the customer’s point of sale as they wanted a centralized environment. They also needed data insights on everything that happened at the retail front-end.”

“For making internal decisions, people need insights and not just raw data. They wanted to democratize BI, which meant implementing the solution in a manner that employees were able to consume it for their everyday needs and SQL Server made this quite easy,” said Karnakota.

Post the implementation of Microsoft’s SQL server, Fabindia has seen an improvement in productivity with ease-to-use technology and better insights. According to Rajpal, the company has also been able to spend money on newer technologies given the cost savings from this new implementation.

“The response time of applications running on the central server and using the databases has increased remarkably. We have managed to save money and are able to put almost 40% additional load on the same hardware. The performance of SQL Server has allowed us to have more appliances connected without performance being affected. My hardware and infrastructure is ready for double the scale that we have today,” said Rajpal.

“Getting the developers for Microsoft SQL Server, or the Microsoft stack in general, is much easier and the resources too are much more readily available than the number of developers on the Oracle platform. Cost was another factor and an important one. Lastly, the kind of functionality available on SQL Server is unmatched as, in one edition, we are able to accommodate partitioning or data warehousing,” said Rajpal adding, “Whereas, in Oracle, I was required to buy the enterprise license first and, subsequently, I would have applied for the partitioning or warehousing solution, which is an add on license. So, in terms of cost and resources available, these two were the guiding factors.”

With SQL Server, Fabindia has not only been able to increase its productivity and save costs but it has also made good use of BI in tracking customer behavior. Moreover, since it is an automation software, from vendors to point of sale, everything is connected to the central servers today.