Conscious green efforts lay the foundation of Frontier\'s success

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Even in the middle of a busy street Frontier Business Systems stands out, all because of its Green strategy.

A complete green building right from the entrance, which greets one with green leaf and caterpillar coloured glasses, the cool rooms where usage of power is kept to the minimum, to their virtualized servers meant to keep the energy consumption low. When Ravi Varges, founded Frontier in 1994, a time when the IT sector had barely any existence in India, hardly had he imagined the green future prospects for the firm. Soon in 2000, the IT became the buzz word in the country and there was no looking back. In few years, things changed and there came in a huge hazard affecting the entire globe – carbon footprint, Varges was quite watchful of the green trends and immediately roped in VMware as a part of its business strategy.
   
“What can be the best way to convince customers than by showing our own example? It was in 2009, when we shifted to the green office and we are among the five to six companies in India who has a complete green conscious building. We have achieved the prestigious LEED rating system from the US Green Building Council,” says Varges. Frontier was using 20 servers to run their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and live environment applications in its prior facility. However, as it virtualized its new facility, the number of servers came down to just two and one chassis, despite the increase in the use of application. Added on to it, along with reducing the space the datacentre occupies in the new facility, the virtualized environment has also brought down the total power consumption roughly from 16,000 watts to just 2400 watts. In fact, the company has been recognized with ISO 27001 certification for its ‘Green Data Center’, whereby, BSI India, the subsidiary of the British Standards Institute, maintains that the datacenter conforms to the highest standards in the world. The Phosphorescence of the entire facility is maintained as it’s mostly made of recycled products or those manufactured not very far from the city.

The initiative wherein Frontier invested around $4 million was a step to capture the huge untapped virtualization market. “The opportunity is two-fold i.e. server and desktop virtualization. Less than 10 percent of servers are virtualized today. While desktop virtualization still meets with various hesitations,” says the founder and the MD.  He is quite keen on keeping up with the trends and tweaking the Proof of Concepts accordingly. “Ofcourse, there are times when clients despite witnessing the entire work flow, the consequences and benefits within a virtualized environment aren’t keen on implementing it. That's where, I personally look at the POC changes and ensure that it is upbeat," he adds. He is all hopeful of a brighter future and gradually is expanding its partner base via collaboration with Citrix, PlateSpin, Marathon, Cisco, TE Connectivity, Emerson, Lenovo, IBM, Oracle and Dell.