As one of India’s fastest growing IT companies, Polaris had over 7,000 associates spread across 14 countries. As with other companies in the Indian software services industry, Polaris had to ensure that requisite software was available for specific project needs.

Once projects were completed, the software had to be released back to the IT department by the project team. However, due to the time taken to sanction the requisition of a particular type of software by the IT team, project teams were reluctant to release the software to the IT department.

Gradually, it was observed that project teams were hoarding licenses. As this process depended on the project teams releasing their software licenses, this led to a situation where the firm had no clarity on the number of software licenses in use.

“In any project, the cost of the software is one of the main components that affect the pricing of delivery or support. To improve our efficiency, it was imperative for us to gain more visibility into the number of licenses that was used across the organization,” says V Balakrishnan, CIO, Polaris.

Additionally, as customer requirements were specific in nature, the IT team had to ensure that the software was deployed according to the requirements of customer offshore development centers.

With an infrastructure spread across 14 countries, and branch offices installing multiple versions of the same application, the task of supporting the infrastructure was extremely challenging. Updating the software versions, anti-virus systems and security patches was one of the most demanding tasks, as the firm had unclear visibility into what operating system each machine was running.