Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), one of India’s largest engineering and manufacturing enterprises supporting the nation’s power, defence, aerospace, and transportation sectors, announced a major digital transformation milestone with Nutanix , a hybrid cloud leader and AI platform company. By consolidating its sprawling infrastructure across 20 data centers into two centralized sites in Haridwar and Hyderabad — and exploring containerization with the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) — BHEL has established an agile private cloud foundation that simplifies IT operations and accelerates future AI readiness.
BHEL operates 16 manufacturing facilities, four regional offices, and numerous service units. It relied previously on a fragmented infrastructure managed independently at each location. The setup created high administrative overhead, limited cost visibility, delayed service delivery, and prevented innovation using AI. By transitioning to a centralized Infrastructure-as-a-Service model using the Nutanix Cloud Platform, BHEL transformed its core operations.
“Simply switching from a three-tier infrastructure to Nutanix solutions reduced our hardware footprint by up to 97%, centralizing our IT operation,” said M.S.C. Kiran, Deputy General Manager of IT, BHEL.
This consolidation allows BHEL’s central IT team to share computing power dynamically across the enterprise as demands change, removing long purchasing delays when individual business units expand.
“Previously, if a unit needed additional hardware, we had to start a fresh procurement cycle, which took a minimum of 90 days. Now, we can reallocate resources from across the estate within weeks, without a separate procurement process,” explained Varun Kumar Dogra, IT Engineer, BHEL.
The operational efficiency gained through centralization has also enabled BHEL to optimize its workforce. Instead of spending time maintaining hardware across disparate locations, technical teams are now reallocated to high-value development and digital transformation initiatives.
“Each of our 20 datacenters had one to two dedicated infrastructure staff members, but now we have three to four personnel managing the entire infrastructure across our two sites,” said Bharat Panwar, Additional General Manager of IT, BHEL. “This has freed up the team to focus on development, innovation and emerging AI initiatives.”
To safeguard critical national infrastructure, BHEL built advanced security and automatic backups directly into its dual-site architecture, protecting essential applications against cyber threats while ensuring continuous operations.
“With our new workflow in place, a fully hardened VM, including vulnerability assessment and penetration testing, can be created within an hour,” added Megha Meshram, Deputy General Manager of IT, BHEL.
Delivered in partnership with implementation partner Team Computers, BHEL is already migrating business-critical workloads, starting with its e-office system. BHEL is also exploring containerization with the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to move applications to a microservices architecture, building an elastic foundation for cloud-native operations and AI adoption.
“We selected Nutanix because it provides a modern, scalable platform for our current workloads while giving us the flexibility to adapt to future business and technology needs,” concluded Panwar. “Through our phased approach, we are building a foundation that not only supports today’s operations, but also positions us to embrace AI, cloud-native applications, and whatever innovations the future may bring.”
“BHEL is setting a benchmark for enterprise modernization,” said Faiz Shakir, Vice President, Sales Asia Pacific and Japan, Nutanix. “By building an elastic cloud foundation across its operations, BHEL simplifies complex IT management while positioning itself to lead the next era of cloud-native innovation and AI adoption.”
