Case Study: Marico Makes Merry

Marico is an Indian group engaged in consumer products and

services in the beauty and wellness space. Some well known brands like

Parachute, Saffola, Sweekar, Nihar, Hair and Care are being marketed by Marico.

The company acquires significant share in the coconut oil, hair oil, edible oil

and other beauty products.

UC for Instant Growth



Being a fast growing company with a vast network, Marico wanted to enable
better communication and collaboration among its employees. The company wanted

to reduce their cost on traveling of their employees for meetings and reviews.

Also, most of the services available to the company's employees were hosted,

hence with the pay-per-use model, cost was a major constraint.

Marico Weds Microsoft



Marico, initially considered using several messaging environments such as Skype,
Gtalk, and Yahoo Messenger, but all this was not enough to satisfy the exact

requirement. Finally, Marico zerod in on the Microsoft Office Communications

Server 2007 for presence, instant messaging, and web-conferencing.

The aim of the solution was to get an enterprise wide

communication and collaboration platform, group instant messaging, support for

multi-party communication and archival of communication. The project consisted

of three phases-solution architecture, testing and roll out. The whole process

took around one month to get it started.

The OCS server was implemented in the data center at the main

office at Rang Sharda at Bandra Reclamation. Chat, presence awareness, and audio

and video conferencing were the modules implemented.

Honeymoon Period



It has just been a few months since the solution was implemented. "The
new solution provides Marico with a competitive advantage by providing messaging

tools that enable communication across multiple vendors/partners/offices and

locations," says Girish Rao. The range of communications options provided

by Office Communications Server2007, will give the mobile work force at Marico,

a powerful new tool to make their time on the road more productive. The solution

is also helping them in better information sharing among employees through

different modes of communication. "Improved collaboration will help our

employees to stay informed, and foster new ideas," says Rao. Also, by using

this solution, Marico has reduced travel costs for its engineers and IT

personnel. They can use Presence to find out who might be available to help and

make contact with that person instantly.