With many years of experience in developing software for various verticals and IT training, Kamal Matta, Head IT, Sonic Group, now wants to share his experiences with potential future CIOs. By Heena Jhingan
Kamal Matta, a graduate in Science, was well settled as a software developer and a trainer at Omni Computers before he joined Sonic Electrochem, known for Jet, its brand of mosquito repellent mats. Later, the brand was sold to Godrej and the company decided to diversify into fiscal services and the Soya business. It has been almost 12 years since the time that Sonic Electrochem restructured itself as Sonic Biochem, a manufacturer and exporter of Soya products.
Back in the day, all data from branch offices used to be sent to the headquarters for punching, which was a hassle as the MIS report generation used to be delayed by nearly 15 days due to manual processes. Some efforts to change the way the data was being collected and processed were made before the company ventured into new businesses. Matta, along with the IT team, developed systems in COBOL on a Unix platform. Using this system over a TCP/IP network was a new concept for the users in those days.
As the group diversified in to new business, it needed to restructure its IT infrastructure to meet the requirements of the new areas and the subsidiaries of the group. Matta was given the charge of IT operations of the Soya business, which at that time clocked a turnover Rs 100 crores. Since then, the company has grown four fold now with about 300 employees across five major locations.
Switching technologies
Matta recalled 2000 as a maddening year as, thanks to the millennium bug, the company had decided to convert the COBOL based systems to a client-server architecture of Visual Basic and Oracle. Soon after taking charge of Sonic Biochem in 2001, he realized that his platter was loaded with many things that needed to be acted upon immediately.
His foremost focus was on designing a centralized IT infrastructure that would save the users time and efforts in getting hold of accurate data. “We needed a low cost technology deployment and tried not to spend much on licensing. Besides, we needed an alternate, yet dependable technology solution,” he said.
In 2007, Matta was promoted as the IT head for the group, leading a team of 12 persons involved in various areas of operations and infrastructure development. Under his current role, Matta is also responsible for looking after the telecom infrastructure of the organization and he noticed that due to the traditional PBX systems, the company was burdened with heavy bills, which could be halved if they used an IP telephony system instead. “We revamped the entire telecom infrastructure by deploying IP-PBX and hooking all the locations under one Cloud, utilizing all WAN and LAN links. We began using IP phones and voice gateways using IPLC and IPTC cards for interconnecting PBXes for voice over IP,” he explained.
Over the last five years, as the IT head of the Group, Matta has undertaken various IT projects. Of these, the SAP deployment was his biggest achievement as the project was completed in a record 90 days. “We went live in December 2010 and for the first four months the solution was running parallel with the legacy ERP system. By April 2011 the enterprise-wide solution was up.”
Matta is proud to have been part of some of the most exciting projects for the group. “We have been innovative when it comes to using technology. There was a point when we realized that there was a need to cut costs on the server side and the simplest way to do it was to virtualize resources. We began server virtualization using VMware / Hyper-V and the physical servers were reduced from 20 to 10,” Matta said, adding that the company was now planning to introduce desktop virtualization
Last year, the company got its own in house data center for 24×7 operations and at the same time the IT team put in extra efforts to migrated the production data center to IBM’s data center facility in Bangalore. “It was important to use an outsourcing model for the production data center. We needed a set up with higher stability and to avoid manpower dependency while achieving a controlled management cost,” he explained.
Resolution 2012
This year is likely to be equally engaging for Matta as he has some big projects lined up. He reasoned that IT can add value to the business if enterprises can learn to effectively process the data resources that they create. “We are contemplating a project around deploying Business Intelligence tools, so that we too can derive maximum value from the information being captured across the value chain.” he said.
Another important task on his To Do list is to develop a data recovery site. He also plans to complete XBRL implementation by year end.
All said and done, Matta still finds his heart in the training room, where he said he had got an immense scope to learn from the young minds in the early years of their careers. “The inquisitiveness of the young minds that I have trained has motivated me to delve deeper into technological concepts and this proved to be healthy for my software development projects. I now want to try delivering my experience to the students in IT institutes in Indore, a city, which is catching up in the area of IT education. I am already in touch with a couple of institutes and might get an opportunity to interact and share my knowledge with the students,” he concluded.
