A CLOUD DATABASE SOLUTION CUTS A PHARMA COMPANY’S CAPEX BY $25,000

By migrating to a high-performing, secure, reliable and scalable PaaS solution, Mankind Pharma has reduced capital expenditure by $25,000 and storage costs by $6,000. Now, the company claims to create reports 11x faster and deliver training to global user

Established in 1995, Mankind Pharma is one of India’s top five pharmaceutical companies. It offers a wide range of prescribed medicines including anti-biotics, anti-fungals, cardio vascular, dermal and erectile dysfunction through a network of 75 carrying and forwarding agents and more than 7,500 stockists. It operates three manufacturing plants and four depots to receive finished products from its own plants and third-party vendors. Mankind Pharma also expanded its exports market to 15 countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

To become a customer-centric global leader in the pharmaceutical industry, Mankind Pharma adopted advanced technologies and strived to provide more accessible and affordable healthcare products.

CHALLENGES

The adoption of new technology was not easy. Numerous challenges stared in the face. The biggest challenge for the company was to enable Mankind Pharma’s IT department to rapidly deliver internal sales application

training to global users and deploy new applications faster. Secondly, it had to improve the database performance for sales application and enable 12,000 users across India and overseas to quickly manage their daily activities, such as creating daily call reports or capturing tour plans.

Mankind Pharma was also in urgent requirement of supporting its business growth by gaining the flexibility to easily expand database capacity rather than limiting to 500 GB. It could help the company to better manage its customers and improve customer experience.

DEPLOYMENT AND EXECUTION

As the next step, the company began to find out the solution that could help it do so. A number of solutions hovered in the market. However, it wanted a solution that could help it go to the global markets and manage customers. After much deliberation, the company deployed Oracle Database Cloud Service. The database solution was expected to handle all its future workloads and help it grow in the global markets. A number of solutions were available in the market with options from public cloud and private cloud providers. Yet it had to see its own requirements and adopt a solution which could be partner in growth. “We selected Oracle Database Cloud Service over other vendors, such as Amazon and IBM because nothing is better than Oracle managing its own databases. We could also easily migrate the existing database license to Oracle Database In-Memory 12c and minimize capital expenditure,” says Pramod Gokhale, Chief Information Officer, Mankind Pharma.

With assistance from the vendor team, Mankind Pharma completed the upgrade to new database which is based on In-Memory technology in just one week and took another 15 days to fine-tune the performance. It also successfully migrated and restored databases in only three days with Oracle Database Cloud Service and Oracle Database Backup Cloud Service.

“I would recommend this solution to companies that are looking for drastic improvement in database performance and reduction in database size. They can simply use the existing database license and migrate to the new platform without changes to applications and investment in new hardware,” Gokhale added.