Case Study of Naaptol published in Open Source For You magazine in the January 2014 edition (http://www.linuxforu.com/2014/02/foss-helps-naaptol-take-e-commerce-new-heights/)

1. Case Study For U & Me
FOSS Helps Naaptol Take
E-Commerce to New Heights!
Naaptol, a leading virtual home shopping platform, grew phenomenally by placing its bets
on open source technology. Adopting the FOSS model not only helped the e-commerce giant
cut down on its early investments, but also proved to be a great enabler in the long run.
O
pen source software has spawned quite a few
success stories, with each one indicating the growing
acceptance of FOSS at the enterprise level. The
classic example of Naaptol, the online retail giant, shows that
companies, irrespective of their size, can leverage FOSS and
enjoy its benefits forever.
The brainchild of an IITian, Manu Agarwal, Naaptol has
grown into a company with a revenue of Rs 2000 million
in a span of just five years. It has witnessed phenomenal
growth, both in terms of products and revenue. Today, the
e-commerce platform sells 200,000 products and 500 brands
on its portal. What started out as a three to four member
group has today evolved into a company that boasts of a
robust team of 500 people comprising the right mix of open
source developers and evangelists.
What’s interesting is that Naaptol depends almost 100
per cent on open source tools to optimise its IT costs and,
therefore, ‘all things FOSS’ seems to be the mantra of the
online retailer.
Chief technology officer at Naaptol, Mahendra Patil, who
describes himself as a true blue Linux and Java professional,
was happy to share the online retail giant’s tryst with open
source. Deploying open source solutions was high on the
priority list from the day Naaptol was launched in 2008, in
an attempt to cut initial investments. As a result, the online
retailer claims to have saved approximately 80 per cent on its
preliminary costs. Witnessing the application turn into a great
success, the owners decided to use this to scale their venture
and enhance their business’ profitability. “I have been in the
open source industry for more than 12 years. Right from the
baby steps of Naaptol, we adopted open source solutions in
different areas like the Naaptol Application Platform, the
infrastructure development environment, and in domains like
quality and testing, performance benchmarking, debugging
and more,” says Patil.
Why the ‘open’ model?
Apart from being cost-effective, FOSS helped Naaptol in
a number of ways. Giving the lowdown on all the factors,
Patil explains, “Open source is indeed cool, as there is
a wide range of open source software available in the
market to suit your IT requirements. From the early days
at Naaptol, we tried out a varied range of open source
tools and these helped us. We could even develop our own
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2. For U & Me
Case Study
business solutions framework with the help of FOSS. If you
have good expertise in the FOSS terrain, you can develop a
distributed, highly customised architecture very easily. You
can make the best of your available resources due to the
adaptable nature of OSS. And this is what we did at Naaptol.
On a day-to-day basis, use of OSS in different departments
of the business boosts your solution analysis power.” Patil
states that the team always keeps track of the current market
trends with reference to proprietary software and tries to find
an alternative open source tool.
A comprehensive list of FOSS
tools used at Naaptol
Development environment
Software/Tool/
Framework
Short description/Purpose
Ubuntu
Desktop environment
CVS
Versioning system
Eclipse
Integrated development
environment (IDE)
Apache Ant
Build management tool
QA/Testing environment
Short description/Purpose
Bugzilla
Bug-tracking system
selenium
Application platform
Software/Tool/
Framework
Function testing
Software/Tool/
Framework
Short description/Purpose
JMETER
To load test functional behaviour
and measure performance
Apache Http server
Web server
EMMA/JaCoCo
Code coverage tool
MySQL
Database
HAProxy
Load balancer
JBOSS
Application server
Software/Tool/Framework Short description/Purpose
Apache SOLR
Enterprise search engine
In addition, the firm is also
in process of evaluation and
migration to SOLR Cloud, which
is an enterprise-class distributed
search platform on top of SOLR
Maatkit
For MySQL database
analysis, rectification and
administration
SysBench
System performance
benchmarking
Java Interactive Profiler (JIP)
/ JBoss Profiler / Memory
Analyzer (MAT)
A profiling tool
JSF
Framework for building component-based user interfaces
for Web applications
Hibernate
Framework for objectrelational mapping (ORM)
Velocity
Template engine
Ehcache / OScache /
Memcache
Caching frameworks
Apache Axis
Web service framework
Phonegap / Apache
Cordova
Mobile development
framework
Apache Mobile Filter
(AMF)
Mobile device detection filter
Mod_security
Web application firewall
Infrastructure
Software/Tool/
Framework
Short description/Purpose
CentOS
Enterprise-class Linux OS for
servers
Nagios
Monitoring tool for the
network and server
OSticket
Support ticket system
102 | January 2014 | OPEN SOURCE For You | www.LinuxForU.com
Performance/Benchmarking/Debugging/Analysis
Major challenges faced while deploying FOSS
Industry experts believe that when it comes to adopting FOSS
in companies, one does face a number of challenges. When we
put this question to Patil, he did agree, saying, “You might face
difficulties in the adoption of open source software if you have
not done the right evaluation or perhaps conducted a survey; or
you are not clear about your own requirements before the actual
implementation of FOSS tools. We didn’t have any major
challenges, as such. When a software’s structure is changed
in a new release, there are chances that you face difficulties
in the upgradation process. At Naaptol, we always keep it in
mind that we do all the testing of hardware and application
platform portability for greater scalability. It also depends upon
the implementation methodology. So, while deploying an open
source solution in your organisation, you need to fix such issues
on a constant basis while using FOSS.”
Advantages that FOSS brings to companies
From his own experience with open source technology, Patil
talks about the significant benefits that FOSS can render to
companies looking to go the open source way. Here are some
pointers from him, as told to us.

3. Case Study For U & Me
available from the community via forums, which can help
you perform the right implementation.
ƒƒ Easy migration of resources: Since knowledge of OSS is
openly available, you can easily migrate, training existing
human resources to a good level, in a minimal time.
ƒƒ Greater scalability: The open source IT architecture
boosts a company’s scalability without any ottlenecks.
Future challenges
Manu Agarwal, CEO, Naaptol
Mahendra Patil, CTO, Naaptol
ƒƒ Choice and availability: One of the best features of the
open source software model is that it offers you a wide
choice and you will always find an open source solution to
suit your requirements.
ƒƒ Highly customisable: You can customise the open
source software as per your needs and can build your own
framework using it.
ƒƒ Lowers costs: OSS reduces the overall cost of evaluation
and implementation.
ƒƒ A viable business model: Open source software has
demonstrated a high level of reliability and robustness, and
can prove to be a viable business model that can lead to
robust revenue streams. Naaptol is a great example.
ƒƒ Support options/forums: A wide range of details are
So, what are the major challenges down the road? “The
e-commerce industry is witnessing a boom in the Indian
market since the last few years. So, if we wish to cope with
the competition and widen our footprint in the industry, there
is a need for a day-to-day adoption of open source technology
to customise data analysis tools and automation in different
areas with engagement of large scale data handling at a higher
speed. This is one major challenge going forward and we will
soon come out with the means to combat this issue. Moreover,
we often seek the help of the open source community through
blogs and forums to find solutions to our problems.”
Open source technology has surely propelled Naaptol onto
the fast track and we are sure many other firms will plunge
into the FOSS world in the years to come!
By Priyanka Sarkar
The author is a member of the editorial team. She loves to weave
in and out the little nuances of life and scribble her thoughts and
experiences in her personal blog.
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