By Heena Jhingan
Indian financial services company Financial Technologies (India) Limited (FTIL), which provides technology IP to create and trade on next-generation financial markets, introduced the country’s first derivatives trading platform in 1995. Today, it delivers a combination of brokerage and exchange solutions and management products.
FTIL’s workforce needs to stay constantly connected to deliver round-the-clock service. Even on the move, the company has to ensure that data security is not compromised under any circumstances. So, about six years ago, they deployed the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and recently upgraded to BES10.
Rohit Ambosta, Senior Vice President – IT at FTIL, says not all the employees need access to sensitive data and most of them work in shifts. As such, the BlackBerry devices have been provided by the company to only select employees; however, they are free to upgrade to BlackBerry handsets of their choice.
Even though a BlackBerry fan from the security perspective, the FTIL workforce wasn’t too satisfied with the experience on BlackBerry Balance. Ambosta says, “The platform, though offered impeccable security features, but containerization of work and personal application environments through the BlackBerry Balance was not up to our expectation.”
“There was little clarity on the work and personal app environments, besides, there were certain other minor issues that we had reported to BlackBerry,” Ambosta elaborates.
He further adds that downloading apps had never been so convenient and even from a normal user’s perspective, the work/personal space segmentation is clear. The platform ensures that there is no compromise to work data and security. The users appreciate the contrivance and flexibility brought in by BlackBerry on the new platform.”
As a long standing BlackBerry customer, FTIL was hoping for an upgrade on the platform that will help them better manage work/life balance with a greater experience.
The wait ended with BES 10 availability, which Ambosta says provided unified device management and security that was able to manage non-BlackBerry environments as well, which would mean FTIL could offer the employees the flexibility of choosing devices other than Blackberry also.
In the past, despite the BlackBerry Balance feature enabled on BES, many FTIL employees chose to carry two devices: one for work and the other for personal applications. However, with BES10, they will now be able to manage Android and iOS mobile devices.
“We have already tested the platform for iPhone (iOS) and tests are on for some of the popular Samsung devices (Android). We will soon have a list of devices that the employees can use and latch them on to the corporate network,” says Ambosta.
The upgrade
When the company decided to upgrade, they were least worried as they were confident that BlackBerry would ensure that the upgrade is a smooth transition.
As FTIL already had BES5 servers deployed in the virtual environment, over the VMware infrastructure, moving on to BES10 was a simple upgrade.
“We were among the early adopters of the BES10 platform, and there were very minor initial hiccups like Mobile Voice System did not work properly; yet we were able to complete the upgrade processes barely within a month, which is not too long a duration for an enterprise of our size,” says Ambosta.
He says it was mostly the approvals, provisioning of servers, procurement of test devices and testing of these devices which took about three to four weeks.
FTIL migrated to BlackBerry Mobile Voice System, enabling workers to transfer calls to their mobile devices when they are away from office, and this has been a huge benefit to employees traveling for business. “The solution has reduced roaming costs by up to 70%, while the encryption has ensured that communications remain secure from anywhere in the world. The capabilities like screen share are excellent collaborative tools,” he says.
“It was important that the users fully utilize the power of BlackBerry 10, which is why we trained them not only for work use, but for personal use as well. The results have been great. The users now enjoy the apps they want. And they can even enjoy watching movies on their TVs at home, simply by pinging the TVs wirelessly via their BlackBerry 10 devices; other applications like MapMyIndia are very popular on the personal use front.”
BES10, coupled with BlackBerry 10 devices, has brought FTIL – a real-time organization with no tolerance for downtime – time savings, enabling the workforce to act faster. At the same time, BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 has created the flexibility for workers to choose their preferred BlackBerry devices without compromising company security. Overall, the solution has delivered the balance, flexibility and security. According to Ambosta, currently about 20 users have already upgraded to BlackBerry 10 devices.
Future call
As Ambosta puts it, technology is never static, and the organization has come a long way since it first started using BlackBerry Enterprise Server. BES, he says, has now evolved to provide a unified device management platform that includes iOS and Android devices, and it is expected that BlackBerry may expand it to cover Windows devices as well.
For the moment, FTIL is experimenting a lot with its new upgrade to BES10. And they seem to be loving it.