Mohamed Naser Al-Hajery & Sons Ltd. (MNH), one of Kuwait’s largest consumer services group, has leveraged Nutanix to enhance performance and availability of digital services and reduce TCO. Migrating to Nutanix ensures the performance and availability of critical digital applications, while reducing TCO by nearly 50%. Reduced complexity enables the IT team to refocus efforts on high-value initiatives that drive business outcomes.
Mohamed Naser Al-Hajery & Sons Ltd. founded in 1946 with a single ‘Kuwaiti Drug Store’, has now become a household name with over 100 brands in the healthcare, FMCG, perfumes and cosmetics, and food and beverage segments.
IT is the enabler of smooth operations of the Group. To ensure the performance and availability of the various critical services and applications, MNH initially invested in a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. Despite being from a leading vendor, it had several shortcomings that impacted the smooth operations of its various lines of business. “As a 24×7 operation with so many retail outlets, every minute of downtime translates to lost sales, frustrated customers, and a direct impact on revenues,” explained Jackson D’Souza CIO at MNH. “We were convinced HCI was the solution, but we needed the support of the best provider in the market.”
Having received an overwhelming number of positive reviews for Nutanix from his regional peers, the decision was clear to D’Souza. “Initially, our intention was to only deploy Nutanix in our main data center, but after experiencing the incredible ease of deployment and use during the POC, we immediately expanded the scope to include our DR site as well,” he said.
Today, all the Group’s core services, as well as its vertical-specific business applications run on Nutanix and MNH has benefitted greatly from the implementation. “The cost benefits are impressive, with our estimates showing the TCO with Nutanix to be 60% less than the offering from our previous partner. Previously, we also had to manage solutions from multiple vendors which meant dealing with complex licensing, engaging with multiple teams for support, and inevitably navigating finger-pointing when things went wrong,” D’Souza said. “With Nutanix, we have a single vendor we trust, and this gives us the confidence to scale without constraints, added costs, or risk.” This simplicity has also translated to the ability for D’Souza to refocus his team’s time and efforts on innovation.
Nutanix has untethered MNH’s IT team from the constraints imposed by the performance limitations of their previous HCI solution. The new implementation has enabled the team to carry out upgrades to the mission-critical core ERP system and run tremendously resource-hungry workloads with no performance issues at all – something that was not possible with the earlier solution.
With Nutanix deployed in its disaster recovery site, MNH now enjoys a near-zero RPO and a significant enhancement to RTO. Previously, a complete restore would take up to 24 hours from the disaster recovery site to the main data center. In comparison, Nutanix achieves the same in under 5 minutes.
Speaking about plans for the future, D’Souza commented, “We’ve been incredibly impressed by the speed of deployment, performance, and ease-of-use of Nutanix. Consequently, we are now in the process of replicating this success and implementing Nutanix for our two sister companies – Greenfields Agriculture and Hydrotek Engineering. We expect MNH to continue its expansion through strategic investments and acquisitions. Usually, the consolidation of IT systems associated with such activities introduces IT complexity. But given how easy app migration is on the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, my team and I are confident we can effortlessly support these needs of the business as it continues to grow.”
“In my experience, it is the perfect combination of market leading technology, with highly-dedicated local expertise that makes Nutanix such a capable and reliable digital transformation partner,” D’Souza concluded.
