Al Fara’a builds a niche infrastructure with Emitac

By providing a scalable and centralized virtual platform for Al Fara’a, Emitac understood the nerve of the construction leader’s infrastructure requirement.

What followed was a massive reduction of cost, 100% profit and a cutting edge virtual environment. As Emitac Enterprise Solutions marks its 40th anniversary in 2016, it has yet another feather to add to its crown.

David Allan Coe had once said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.” The beauty and success of physical infrastructure or the virtual infrastructure, it all lies in the foundation; For Al Fara’a Group, a regional leader in the construction industry, this was a key success ingredient.

When technology made its way through

Al Fara’a Group has been in the face of the region for over 4 decades now and has been delivering a comprehensive array of capabilities in building, civil engineering, MEP and contracting-related specialties that included ground technologies, structures, airports, healthcare, hospitality, education, defense, oil, and gas, etc.

When Mohammed Imaduddin, Group CIO of Al Fara’a group joined the organization eight years ago, technology in Al Fara’a was bounded to a telephone, a computer and a printer. The management reflected that was all that a construction company needed in technology.

“It was a challenge for me to put forward the benefits of technology in a strategic way to the management. But then gradually things happened and we successfully integrated a good number of our operations with newer technologies and today we are one of the leading construction companies where technology leads our operations. Right from various audio and video conferring solution to Al Fara’a Cloud to vehicles with sensors that monitor the temperature of the cement mix that goes to the site, everything is monitored and closely knit with cutting edge technologies.”

Today, as Imaduddin puts it across, the company doesn’t take a step forward without technology. The Al Fara’a Cloud was also a revolutionary step that redefined the operations of the entire group, the employee dashboards, business process and the entire infrastructure at Al Fara’a.

The marriage with Emitac Enterprise Solutions

The group has widespread operations in the region with around 85 offices. The need arose for a centralized platform to manage the offices and the business process.

“The construction industry is the most unorganized sector in the whole industry, not because of the people, but because of a lot of uncertainties that cling on to the daily operations. Right from managing the work hours and productivity of the labors to monitoring the construction vehicles that operate on ground, we needed a platform that could centralize all these operations and at the same time save our time and money. Our search ended with Emitac Enterprise Solutions.”

Imaduddin adds, “This was 3-4 years back. At that time all our servers were decentralized. Though all had backups there wasn’t a proper system. The Emitac Team and Al Fara’a brainstormed for a month on the design structure and finally came up with the concept of a centralized data center. People have been talking about cloud recently, but at Al Fara’a we had implemented it long back. We planned to build the Al Fara’a cloud where everything was synced in one platform. We brought the required hardware from Emitac and we built our data center. We brought a space in Etisalat. After building this data center set up, we virtualized all the servers into one centralized and unified platform with three to four racks. So all the companies across the region came under one system…all the ERPs, file sharing, dashboard etc. were synchronized into one single platform. That step was a big game-changer for Al Fara’a and we had major cost-saving.”

“Principles, Transparency and Ethics are the greatest attributes that set Emitac Enterprise Solutions a class apart from the other SIs.”

Mohammed Imaduddin

Group CIO of Al Fara'a Group

Modern Infrastructure revised with Emitac

Times changed, old technologies made way for new ones and hardware made way for virtual platforms. Al Fara’a too recognized the need for an infrastructure overhaul. Server and storage infrastructure was required to support growth and the changing new business requirement. Each server hosted an application and backup consumed a lot of time – more than 24 hours. Additionally, they also wanted to control and minimize spam emails. Al Fara’a was, therefore, looking for a solution with fresh new scalable hardware that would cater to their needs for the next 5 years, reduce hosting and hardware footprint costs and control spams.

“Emitac came up with a good strategy. The strategy helped me in splitting my costs into monthly payments. The strategy and plan were studied in its entirety. So what we did was, we took the whole cost of the AMC to renew because it is my own data center. We studied which hardware needs to be eradicated and where change has to be injected.“

From 3 racks to 1 rack-journey made easy

Consuming a major part of the budget was the 3 racks. After doing a thorough calculation of the entire situation, EES proposed a plan to cut down the racks to 1. It was something that was good to hear but not easy to achieve.

Going from 3 racks to 1 rack involved a lot of risks. The data center hosted the data of the entire group, so just one flaw was enough for the entire system to crash. We also could not afford to have downtime as it meant worse to my business. But thanks to the careful and mindful planning of Emitac, we are through it and the entire project was completed very professionally.

The EES team did a great job of implementing the project and at the same time making sure that the business didn’t suffer.

So the result today is:

Zero Month ROI
100% Profit+
A Completely New Hardware
Rental Cost Reduced Drastically
An Edge on Technology

Why Emitac was the perfect choice

After a good half an hour of technical conversations, the Group CIO has a smile on his face when I asked him about one distinctive factor that sets Emitac a class apart as a SI.

Principles, Ethics and Transparency—these are the golden words that come to Imaduddin’s mind while answering why Emitac was the perfect partner for them.

Emitac Enterprise Solutions has a ‘Code of Business Ethics’ book that every employee has to sign. From a vendor-client relationship to each and every aspect of rendering a project successfully, certain norms have to be followed. There are penalties for those who fail to.

“One of the biggest factors that make Emitac stand apart from the other SIs is that they are very straight and transparent when it comes to business. It has been a long-standing relationship with them and we are set to maintain this for years to come.”.

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