Eveready is Indias leading manufacturer of dry cell batteries and flashlights, and the worlds third largest carbon-zinc battery manufacturer. The company strategically used IT to enhance the business performance of its stakeholders. It achieved major business benefits by fine-tuning forecast accuracy and tracking inventory status using Linux. Some of its projects of merit include: balanced scorecard to measure organizational and individual performance, Web-based field reporting tool integrated to mobile devices, and the unified business systeman integrated e-business solution that connects manufacturing units, sales offices, warehouse and sales force.

"Using technology to manage over 15 sales branches and 9 manufacturing plants, plus an additional mobile distribution operation in rural sectors, is an extremely formidable task. Our legacy environment was disparate, built on a heterogeneous demand-based architecture. This created a need for establishing a single point of contact. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has greatly simplified management and given us complete freedom to scale up using low cost commodity hardware, with absolutely no compromise in performance or reliability. Migration from our legacy environment was seamless, and all applications have been shifted to Oracle E-business Suite on Enterprise Linux successfully," explained Choudhury.

Roots is a light engineering company with varied product services. Its core business is exporting electric horns to leading automobile manufacturers. The company achieved high impact for its business operations with key implementations such as EDI integration with SAP, supplies portal integration, CRM for dealers and distributors, and MRP and product costing solution. Its robust metrics system to measure RoI was a clincher. "We are looking into innovative tools to solve our business issues and I thank the jury and team at Dataquest and CIOL for rewarding our hard work," said Balasubramaniam.