Kunal Dhingra is the IT infrastructure head at Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI). He supports internal IT plus that of customers in 33 countries worldwide in the areas of networking, cloud, data center, and service assurance. He details how CX Cloud provides critical network visibility and team training to aid LTI’s continued success as a global IT leader.

LTI is a technical consulting and digital solutions company, a global IT leader, and the fastest growing IT company in Asia. We have more than 485 clients and operations in 33 countries worldwide, and we are growing exponentially. The company had $2 billion in revenue in 2021 and 15% year-over-year growth. And in less than four years, our employee count has nearly doubled to more than 45,000.

When I joined LTI in 2018, I realized that we needed to initiate a digital transformation of our network. The existing network was full of legacy equipment and systems that were extremely expensive to maintain and were not compatible with new technologies.

We needed to overcome many hurdles to update the network to ensure users and the business were not impacted. But we realized the benefits far outweighed the risks.

I also knew that many of our customers were launching digital transformation initiatives to update their networks. I decided to use our internal IT department, which was among the first to align to the modernization effort, as a way capture best practices.

Since our primary goal is to speed the digital acceleration journey for our customers, we had to do it for ourselves first to show customers that we know exactly how to help them succeed. We also needed to upskill our people—very quickly.

I immediately began working on developing the best strategy to modernize our network with the right technology to support our rapid growth, security requirements, and operational efficiencies and allow us to be proactive.

The plan was to move everything to SD-LAN and the cloud. Also as a part of this transformation, we moved to a hyper-converged, scalable infrastructure, added to our security portfolio, implemented next-generation firewall, refined our security architecture, and more.

But our goal of upscaling our IT infrastructure and upskilling our people to the highest quality was still not fully met. This is where Cisco CX Cloud came in.

I attended Cisco Live Barcelona in 2020, where I was introduced to data and insights that CX Cloud provides that would improve our IT team operational efficiency. I saw that the resources offered in one place in CX Cloud would strengthen my IT team’s knowledge quickly by providing training, Ask the Experts sessions, CX Cloud private communities, and product documentation.

I was immediately impressed and decided to implement CX Cloud at LTI. And the value of that choice was clear right away, due to the many features of CX Cloud that have helped our IT operations and have been critical to our growth and success at LTI.

Better decision making with increased visibility into real-time data 

The access to data in CX Cloud provides benefits to us in three key areas:

1. Cost and time savings: The top benefit of CX Cloud has been the visibility and immediate access to the data that we’ve always wanted, to better manage our business. It provides all the data we need on our Cisco infrastructure in one single pane of glass.

   We can quickly see all the information regarding our Cisco infrastructure, including open vulnerabilities and licensing and consumption data. Now we can access the information we need quickly and easily, saving time and money.

2. Increased compliance: Before CX Cloud, obtaining licensing and consumption data required my team to conduct a manual assessment of a massive spreadsheet, which resulted in a lot of human errors.

   Without the single-pane-of-glass access to insights, provided by CX Cloud, LTI was facing a constant risk of over-deployment and non-compliance that challenged our infrastructure and our business. Now, CX Cloud allows us to stay on top of our entitlements and fully understand how the services are being consumed.

3. Decreased risk: With CX Cloud, we can view open vulnerabilities verified by Cisco expert analysis. This saves our IT team a great deal of time since we are able to quickly identify and agree on potential risks to be addressed. As a result, our team can be more proactive and remediate faster, saving hours that we otherwise used to spend on vulnerability risk management.

Ability to quickly upskill team with on-demand training

The on-demand training easily accessible in CX Cloud provides my team with valuable skills and helps keep them challenged and constantly learning. The on-demand training is important to us because coordinating training for the team was previously difficult due to employees’ varying schedules and workday demands.

More than 100 of my employees have earned Cisco certifications and CX Cloud’s library of learning content has enabled them to access practice labs and other curated content. I believe that upskilling talent leads to better overall job satisfaction and contributes to our low company attrition rate, which is almost 20% less than that of the rest of India’s IT industry.

Looking forward to continued success with CX Cloud

So, what do I see in the future for LTI with the help of Cisco and CX Cloud? One thing I know for sure is that with the expert guidance, actionable data, and leading insights provided by CX Cloud, we will definitely be able to achieve our KPI goals and succeed in our digital transformation initiative.

Soon, we plan to look to Cisco to help us move to automated remediation. This will enable us to be faster than ever before at less cost, while being more proactive, so that LTI can continue to help our customers grow with the same success as we have grown ourselves.

Overall, CX Cloud has given LTI’s leading team the insights needed to improve our ways of working as well as our performance and security as we continue to strive to be a organization with a stronger, more skilled, and more satisfied team that has the tools to exceed our customers’ needs every day.