• Client : Unilever Iran
  
• Activities : One of the world's largest FMCG company, which produces and markets over 400 brands spanning 14 categories of home, personal care and food products. The company's brand portfolio includes favourites such as Lipton, Knorr, Dove and Omo.
  
• No of users : Approx. 100
  
• Active domains : www.unilever.com , www.unileveriran.com
  
• Internet gateway : 2 Leased line at HO and one leased line at the factory.
  
• Server OS : Mandriva Linux
  
• Client OS : Mandriva Linux

Contacts

• Dubai - Vijay Atal, Unilever arabia, Office : +971 4 8815552
  
• Tehran – Mohamedreza Moshajeri, Unilever Iran, Office : +98 21 88654200
  
• Durban – Indren Maistry, Unilever South Africa, Office :
  

The Challenge

In 2003, Unilever entered the Iranian market by establishing on-shore operations directly. With a population of 68 million people and a relatively high GDP per capita, Iran is considered the largest FMCG market in the Middle East. Unilever has invested in setting up an office in Tehran and factory in Qazvin producing Tea and Home and Personal Care products.

The task of implementing IT solutions at its Iran facility, turned into a challenge, since the company could not use any technology with a specific American content, due to the US embargo on exports to Iran. Unilever has very strong business principles in place – being a global company it respects each and every law that's in place in any part of the world. So under no circumstances was it to break any of these laws.

Thus, Unilever Iran had to search for alternative technologies and software solutions, in order to setup its IT infrastructure, which would enable it to communicate with its customers and partners worldwide. This search pointed them towards Linux and Opensource

Though the company had used Linux elsewhere on servers to run as a backend solution, they had never implemented Linux on the user side and on a large scale. They did not have the requisite skills within Unilever to implement those solutions on a wide scale.

The Solution

NGIT was entrusted with the task because we were a niche player and after Unilever had read about our achievements in a local IT magazine.

As per the contract between NGIT and Unilever Iran, we implement a complete range of solutions for the latter. Though there were many flavours of Linux to choose from, Red Hat & Novell could not be used due to the embargo. This decided the selection in favour of Mandriva, a European Linux distribution.

Though we had been working on open source technologies for more than two years before the project, we had never attempted a project of this scale and magnitude. We had worked on most of the components independently, but had never tried to integrate everything into an enterprise solution of this scale, primarily due to lack of opportunities.

Most computer users in Iran are quite proficient at working with Farsi (Persian)-based applications, it was a challenge finding open source Farsi fonts for OpenOffice office productivity suite. However, in the end NGIT was successful in localising OpenOffice by adding Farsi fonts to the infrastructure in place.

Also, since Unilever as an organisation is growing, the entire IT infrastructure was designed to support future growth. In the end, the entire IT infrastructure except for the ERP was migrated to Mandriva Linux platform. The key components were desktop workstations, file sharing, mail server, proxy server, firewall, virtual private network (VPN), antivirus, WAN and backup solutions.

The Infrastructure

Desktops

• Linux desktop
  
• Office applications with Farsi support
  
• Centralized authentication
  
• Browser & email clients
  
• Cetralized file storage and security
  
• Antivirus
  
• Network Printing
  

Servers

• File server
  
• Mail server
  
• Proxy server
  
• Data backup
  
• Firewall and VPN
  

WAN

• VPN over Internet
  
• Mail routing between offices and to external network
  

Project Duration and Schedule

The project was completed in six stages and took 11 months to complete. The rough schedule of implementation was as below

• Discussions and preliminary proposal - January 2005
  
• The pilot implementation and proof of concept demonstration at the site - February 2005
  
• Finalisation and approval of technical and financial proposal - March to May 2005
  
• Implementation at the head office in Tehran - June to July 2005
  
• Implementation at the factory and the Wide Area Network (WAN) - Sep to Oct 2005.
  
• Preparation of user manuals and final hand over - December 2005
  

Lessons Learned

We were constantly evolving the project based on the challenges encountered. The biggest of them was about end user acceptance and trying to match their expectations. One thing we learned in this project was that migration to Linux is about Change Management and handling people as much as it is about adapting and integrating the technologies and solutions.

The feedback from Unilever IT team and the users have been excellent. As part of the project, our engineers had imparted extensive training to the Unilever Iran IT team. They have been managing and supporting the solution with out our assistance since the handover and they are doing a good job at that.

We also learned that open source is not nameless, faceless, and it's not charity. Shared knowledge propels the whole of society forward, open technology development can drive innovation for an entire industry.