For a robust business

Mankind Pharma is using cloud for its mail service and is confident the technology will become more critical for companies

Clocking the highest growth rate amongst the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in India, Mankind Pharma has almost doubled its revenues every two years and is now a Rs 2,200-crore company. A fully integrated pharma company, it set shop in 1995, and has a pan-India presence with offerings ranging from antibiotics and antifungals to gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, dermal and erectile dysfunctional categories. Its portfolio also includes several OTC and FMCG products. The company is on a fast-growth highway and wants to emerge as the market leader in the next few years.

What is helping the company phenomenally is its IT infrastructure. “We have our own data centre, which we set up with the help of IBM. In terms of security, we use Juniper and Cisco switches,” says Vineet Bansal, IT Head, CTO, CIO, Mankind Pharma. And while the company is still a little cagey about letting bigger applications such as ERP be on cloud, it is happy with using the technology for its email services.

“We switched to Google mail about seven months ago, and have always been using cloud technology for emails for quite some time,” reveals Bansal. The advantages, he points out, are many. For instance, you can do away with setting up your own servers for mails. “You also don’t have to fret about upgrading your servers with an increase in size as we did in the past,” he says. With the technology, all that the company has to do is purchase the number of users you have, and forget about the bandwidth, network connections and so on.

Bansal knows the company’s priorities. “For a pharma company like ours, being an IT perfectionist isn’t our job. Our core competencies lie elsewhere,” he says. And setting up an IT infrastructure and even working on expanding or shrinking it with demand would mean taking your eyes off the ball. Bansal is confident cloud computing is an answer to several similar issues. “Although a new concept, cloud computing is a great solution here. All your IT infrastructure can be on cloud and you are sorted,” he says.

Then why is Mankind Pharma making use of the technology only for mails, you ask? Bansal says cloud computing being a new concept is the prime reason. “It will take some time before one has enough confidence on the technology to run critical applications,” he says. He admits it will be a great option in future, even for his own company, since it would mean not having to invest heavily in any IT infrastructure and just purchase whatever you want. The deal will be sweeter when there are more vendors to choose from.

Another issue Bansal currently sees is most vendors offering cloud services from overseas. “For critical apps, you need a good set up nearby so that you know the vendor really well. A lot also depends on the SLAs that you have with the vendor,” he reminds. The IT expert is also sure that it is a matter of time before people embrace the technology whole-heartedly. “Companies are taking small steps in the direction,” he says, reminding about Mankind Pharma’s mail facilities on cloud. He feels it will also help if, with time, the sector offers portability, wherein the customer can change his app from one vendor to another. “That will give a major thrust to a customer’s trust in the technology, since he will not feel stuck with just one option,” says Bansal.