Established in 1998, Hikal is an active partner to several companies in the areas of pharmaceuticals, biotech, agrochemicals and specialty chemicals industries. The company provides active ingredients, intermediates and research and development solutions and also collaborates with innovator companies and offers solutions in contract research, customer synthesis and custom manufacturing. It has also had its infrastructure inspected and approved by globally recognised bodies such as USFDA but what the company is equally proud of is its IT infrastructure.
“IT is one of the most important pillars for us. Nearly 95-98 per cent of our products are exported and unless we are technically at par with customers that include companies such as Pfizer, there will be a technological mismatch,” says Falgun Shukla, senior general manager, IT, Hikal. The company also has to be technologically aggressive and advanced to protect its partner company’s intellectual property rights (IPRs). The company currently has 20 servers, 350 landpoints and advances software applications. It has also gone in for desktop virtualisation and was one of the first companies to implement that. The company was also one of the first ones to go for Red Hat Linux way back in 2004.
Shukla also talks about how the company has been making use of cloud to support its IT advancement. He, however, gives the entire credit for being one of the first users of cloud to the company’s management, which is not only dynamic but also IT-savvy. Among the three categories, Hikal has been using infrastructure as a service since 2003 by way of data centres. Its mail severs hitched on to cloud in 2004 and the ERP servers were placed in data centres the same year. “We upgraded our mail servers in 2007, but we have been using infrastructure as a service since 2003,” says Shukla, revealing that it was not created in-house and a service provider was used for the same.
“We use software as a service for our mails so that they pass through the adequate anti-spam and anti-virus screens,” says Shukla, adding how Hikal has been using the service since 2006 onwards. However, when it comes to platform as a service, the company is still sceptical about the change and is still testing the concept. “We should be good to go in the next few months, since data security is an issue that still needs to be addressed,” he says.
Apart from using a public cloud, the company is also using a lot of private cloud by way of data virtualisation so that confidential data stays in-house. Shukla emphasises the company couldn’t have found a better way of dealing with IT pressures. “We are a Rs 500 crore company and back in 2003, we were a Rs 150-200 crore company. Using infrastructure as a service has released a lot of pressure on our IT department,” he says. He gives an instance: an IT team of 16 people manage 400 people across seven locations. “Imagine the pressure they would have been under if they also had to take care of data, its security, maintaining servers and so on, not to mention the cost of creating and maintaining such data in-house,” he reveals. ‘
Instead, the company has found a more secure, more user-friendly and cost-effective way out by way of cloud. “We have hired a server rack from our service provider, where one rack contains six servers and two storage boxes. If we had to do it on our own, it would have cost us nothing less than Rs 45-50 lakh, along with an annual maintenance that would be at least 25 per cent of the cost,” Shukla says. Instead, the company is paying Rs 8 lakh annually for the entire rack and its maintenance. Clearly, cloud has meant clearer skiers for Hikal.
