Case Study

Zen’s exponential increase in online trading volumes supported by Netmagic’s dedicated hosting services

Zen Securities Limited (ZSL) is among the leading financial services companies in India offering Financial and Investment related services and products. ZSL started operations in 1986 and today has a strong customer base of over 50000 customers across India. Some of the services offered by ZSL include investment advisory services; trading in cash market of NSE and BSE; trading in Futures and Options on NSE and BSE; internet trading in stocks, trading in commodities on MCX and NCDEX , portfolio management and other financial services. Once ZSL started catering to customers from the farthest corners of India, customers started requesting online trading facilities for easier trading. ZSL had to build the entire technology, right from scratch. Were they successful? How did Netmagic fit into the scheme of things?

Business Case

Based on customer demand, Zen decided to enable online trading facility for its customers and enhance customer experience while trading through Zen. Zen understood that attracting new customers and retaining them required the right suite of products and services and an efficient and responsive online experience. Their objective was to exceed customer expectations from an online trading partner by meeting the exacting performance standards expected by customers today. However, providing an online trading portal meant that Zen needed a scalable and robust IT infrastructure along with burstable bandwidth to accommodate any increase in user traffic on the portal.

The company identified early enough that managing the IT infrastructure for this business is not their core competence and will put additional burden on their existing IT resources. They wanted their IT team to focus on enabling business rather than managing the IT infrastructure component. Hence, they decided to partner with a managed IT hosting service provider.

Solution

Netmagic’s datacenter hosting services

IDC and Managed Hosting

• Colocation – full rack
• Ethernet bandwidth
• Link patching

Key Benefits

• Significant cost benefits as a result of low capital investment on IT infrastructure and hiring of resources to manage the same
• High availability of IT infrastructure and bandwidth along with 99.99% uptime and low latency for their online trading portal ensured enhanced and consistent customer experience
• Quick turnaround time and improved responsiveness to support requests
• Improved IT infrastructure availability as a result of 24x7x365 end-to-end network management and monitoring

Business Opportunity

Until early 2008, Zen Securities operated through its multiple branch offices in A.P., Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal. ZSL was aware that e-services revolutionized the trading industry with a new cost structure model for transactions, information, and marketing. This model also increased transaction activity to an all-time high. ZSL customers also demanded an online trading facility for a seamless and efficient business experience. It was only natural, as a customer centric entity that ZSL decided to venture into this initiative in mid 2008.

While ZSL already provided the traditional option of visiting a branch and meeting in person with a broker to its investors and diversified clientele, it also wanted to offer a suite of value-added services such as online research, portfolio valuation, investment recommendations, and enhanced trading execution speed online as part of its core business offering and customer experience. However, sustaining a high volume of trading on the portal required a highly robust, scalable and flexible IT environment enabled by state-of-the-art infrastructure and bandwidth connectivity. As Zen wanted its internal IT team to focus on other core business issues rather than managing the IT infrastructure, it decided to partner with an experienced managed IT hosting service provider who could support their business critical IT infrastructure requirements.

There were other challenges as well:

• ZSL’s trading servers are connected to the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). This required high bandwidth and a 24X7 basis monitoring to ensure high availability.
• Online trading brings in regulatory and compliance issues such as maintaining back-ups of all trading data for three years. ZSL could not have met these mandates on time without an able hosting provider.
• ZSL’s internal IT team had to focus on building its own back office application and managing and monitoring the critical infrastructure for this portal internally would have been a tough job.

ZSL, like any aspiring leader wanted to focus on driving users and customer growth without compromising user experience. After a careful analysis of the underlying issues, ZSL chose to partner with Netmagic for their datacenter hosting services. To maximize their own domain expertise and leverage the Netmagic advantage, ZSL opted for dedicated hosting and colocation of its 9 trading servers at Netmagic’s datacenters.

Value Proposition

To ensure a seamless migration to Netmagic’s datacenter, ZSL immediately formed a core IT team, led by Mr. Phani Kumar Arava, Head of IT services. The full migration canvas was envisioned and the range of possible challenges from allocation and scheduling to scalability and transparency were discussed. This team supervised the seamless migration to the new infrastructure and financial software. Netmagic’s solutions for ZSL include core and specialized IT infrastructure services:

• Colocation of 9 servers at Netmagic’s datacenter
• Server hosting and firewall protection
• Oracle database administration services
• Setting up of platform and purchase of licenses
• Back up frequency, volume of backup and guaranteed uptime
• Bandwidth and 24X7 connectivity

For ZSL, Netmagic leveraged its core expertise areas of IDC and Managed hosting, Colocation with full rack services, Ethernet bandwidth and Link patching to build a seamless solution.

Key Takeaways

ZSL’s trading volumes has increased exponentially since the online trading facility was launched in June 2008. The bandwidth connectivity problem with the NSE has been successfully resolved by Netmagic. Netmagic has also been able to resolve the slow access to the ZSL site, especially faced by BSNL customers, through an alternate routing solution.

Says Mr. Phani Kumar Arava, Head-IT, ZSL, "Engaging with Netmagic was a good springboard to go forward with our company plans. We get to focus on the core financial services portfolio while they ensure IT infrastructure that delivers a quality customer experience. A lot of technical issues were solved with their help. Their service level is good and they have de-risked our service delivery process. We will continue to partner with them for our future initiatives as well."

ZSL has measured tangible benefits through this partnership. These include:

• Significant cost benefits as a result of low capital investment on IT infrastructure and hiring of resources to manage the same
• High availability of IT infrastructure and bandwidth along with 99.99% uptime and low latency for their online trading portal ensured enhanced and consistent customer experience
• Quick turnaround time and improved responsiveness to support requests
• Improved IT infrastructure availability as a result of 24x7x365 end-to-end network management and monitoring