HCL Domino Powers the Entertainment and Media Industries

An Unexpected Hurdle for a Newspaper Giant

Malayala Manorama is a morning newspaper in the Malayalam language published from Kottayam, Kerala, India by the Malayala Manorama Company Limited.

It was first published as a weekly newspaper, starting on March 22, 1888, and moved to a daily newspaper that is now delivered in both paper and digital form to more than 20 million subscribers.

Having built up a worldwide presence and momentum over more than 130 years in business, it’s now the second-oldest newspaper in the Malayalam language in Kerala in circulation and the largest circulated Malayalam daily newspaper. This media group also has TV, radio stations, and many magazines and online editions as additional media outlets.

It is no surprise that when the COVID pandemic impacted the world, Manorama needed to keep its successful stride — but it also needed to act fast to be able to deliver important news stories without interruption.

The dilemma: How could this massive organization transform operations overnight and establish a working environment that would allow their 5000+ employees to remain productive — and keep millions of subscribers happy and informed?

Extending the power of Domino to Mobile

V.V. Jacobs, the General Manager and CIO of Malayala, says, “Fortunately the HCL Domino platform has been in place at our company for over 20 years, providing our workforce with a secure and reliable way to access their mail either via the Notes or Verse client.”

He also says that for his team the transition of the Digital Solutions ownership from IBM to HCL in 2019 has been a smooth and positive experience. The HCL team, which supported the company throughout the transition, helped pave the way for it to build upon the solid Domino foundation and extend it for mobile access. This addressed a critically important need during the pandemic and also has transformed the way the organization works.

Fortunately, the Malayala’s IT team recognized the importance of keeping its environment running on the latest version of Domino to take advantage of the new capabilities that HCL delivers with each new release. Malayala has Domino v12 deployed and they are seeing, first-hand, the benefits of its improved security and Active Directory integration to simplify password management for the employees, reducing the IT workload.

In recent years, HCL Sametime and Connections were also added to their environment to give the workforce even more ways to collaborate. With Sametime v11.6, employees can conduct online video meetings from wherever they are, and, with Connections, share projects across teams, to keep things moving. The employees truly appreciate having so many digital avenues readily available to them to do their work.

The Way Forward

Creating the opportunity for the workforce to use their own mobile devices for their jobs has fundamentally transformed the way they work and led to an amazing boost in employee satisfaction and productivity.

Not only is mobile access in place and in daily use by the workforce, the IT team put in place a solution to manage the mobile devices for the organization intelligently and efficiently. This has allowed business to not just continue, but to grow!

In the post-project assessment, it was gratifying to learn that the rollout of the extended mobile environment on top of their solid Domino foundation happened about 80% faster than it would have with competitor solutions. It’s clear it was a smart decision to build on and modernize the solid Domino foundation.

Overall, the new environment has fostered an improved level of cooperation and communication between colleagues and across the organization. This is resulting in greater business success today and a vision for continued success in the future.