Macmillan India Case Study : With AWS as a great contributor
Macmillan India has provided publishing services for education field since very long time. Their primary business involves editing, printing and distributing text books and course materials to education providers from Primary schools to higher education institutions. The company also offers curriculum-based study material including video clips, 3D Animations. It comes under the category of private company owned by Holtzbrinck Group, they entertain more than 500 employees and their headquarter is in Gurugram in northern India.
What Macmillan India says about AWS?
The Finance & Operations Director of Macmillan India, Rajesh Pasari said that
“ Timeliness and meeting deadlines is an essential element of our business. Using AWS enabled us to get our textbooks into the hands of students before the the start of term and allowed us to work on our plans for delivering more learning resources over the internet”.
What Challenge they faced?
In 2011, Macmillan India installed a new senior management team, changes its business strategy and restructured operations in India as a single market instead of four separate geographical regions. They says that “Efficient distribution is the key to their success” But their SAP solution disrupts tasks such as order processing , couriering, and parcel tracking. This lead to the delay in their motive of providing textbooks to the students on time.
The infrastructure in on-premises data center in Chennai had some problems that affected the system availability of Macmillan India, the problems that Macmillan India faced were:
- Frequent server breakdown.
- Compromising in application performance due to less storage and networking capacity.
- Faced limiting remote access.
- Sometime some disconnections in the physical connectivity to the data centers they were using.
On average, they require a performance availability of 99 percent and more, they were getting 99 percents or lesser. Macmillan India realized this situation as unsustainable and started looking for alternative infrastructure options.
Why Amazon Web Services?
Now, Macmillan India had decided to move to some different infrastructure service of AWS cloud. This enabled the company to achieve its objective and to avoid the expenses and management load of employing and inhouse IT administrators.
The IT infrastructure head of Macmillan India said that, “Our analysis revealed we could almost eliminate our capital costs and cut our operating costs about 30 percents by moving to AWS cloud. Also, compared to the other cloud providers we reviewed, AWS offered superior storage management and snapshotting capabilities”.
Macmillan India have moved their core applications — the SAP module, a Drupal online learning system and Customer relationship management(CRM) system from Chennai data center to AWS.They engaged Pricewaterhouse coopers(PwC) to design an SAP solution on AWS that would meet the technical and cost requirements. After this, they started shifting many of their modules to AWS. Once they satisfied by the outcome, PwC completed the migration and the new system went live in production on May 2013.
Now, Macmillan India runs its SAP solution in production using Microsoft window server 2008 and SQL server 2008 on 2 Amazon Elastic Compute cloud (Amazon EC2) m2.2xlarge(an instance type) instance. Both the Instances for different functionalities. Amazon Elastic Block store (Amazon EBS) provided block-level storage for the file systems and provisioned IOPS for the SQL server databases. Daily snapshots were taken for EBS and stored into Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3) reliably. To recover information at time of any disaster, the company leverages multiple Availability Zones and launches environment from images and Snapshots. They used many other services also like Amazon Virtual private cloud(Amazon VPC), Amazon VPC NAT and much more in them. They created a fully automated and an instructing design of their business over Amazon Web Services(AWS) Resources.
What are the Benefits they get ?
They get many benefits in different different aspects, that are:
- By AWS pay-as-you-go model, which allowed the company to consume only the resources needed to support peaks and declines in demand.
- The company has reduced the time of provisioning a new environment from six weeks to 30 minutes, which engineers can scale up and down at the mouse click.
- They get the advantages of robust security and data protection controls to protect its environment.
Overall, Macmillan India is extremely pleased with the flexibility, cost-effectiveness, performance of the AWS infrastructure.
What AWS Services they are using?
- Amazon EC2 : Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that provide secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web scale cloud computing easier for the developers.
- Amazon EBS: Amazon Elastic Block Store is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale.
- Amazon S3 : Amazon Simple Storage Service is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
- Amazon VPC : Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, lets you provision a logically isolated Environment of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define for your Business
Hence, Amazon is the most leading company in the field of cloud computing. It is becoming a major part in almost all the types of industries. In this blog, we have discussed about the use case of Education field company. Similarly, it is becoming more and more popular in all the fields like Entertainment, IT etc.
I hope this article will help you to go deep dive into the use cases of AWS and how its services are making benefits for all types of industries.
Thank You !!!!
