Flamingo Pharmaceuticals Ltd

Flamingo Pharmaceuticals Ltd. was founded in 1985 as Flamingo Impex Pvt. Ltd. The company has two manufacturing units located at the outskirts of Mumbai, which conform to world-class quality standards. Flamingo enjoys an ever-growing base of loyal customers in 50 countries across all 5 continents.The focus of Flamingo’s business revolves around making healthy life not just a privilege but also a right that can be enjoyed by all.

SAP hosting services from NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, enable Flamingo Pharmaceuticals to save 40% on CapEx

Flamingo Pharmaceuticals wanted to focus their internal resources on expanding and growing their core business rather than setting and managing a datacenter to host their SAP ERP application. How did NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, help them achieve their objective?

Business Case

With ambitious growth plans for strengthening and expanding their operations and the need for streamlining internal processes to support these plans, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals had implemented SAP ERP. The SAP application was running on HP UNIX and Oracle database. The company soon realized that supporting and hosting the application internally would involve large capital expenditure for setting up a datacenter and recruiting skilled resources to manage it 24x7. Hence, Flamingo decided to avail the services of a managed IT hosting service provider who could provide a highly available and scalable IT environment for hosting and managing the SAP ERP.

Solution

Flamingo has availed of complete datacenter hosting services for SAP ERP, colocation with Operating System (OS) and database support.

Solution Snapshot

• Dedicated Server Hosting
• Dedicated Firewall Services
• Bandwidth & Connectivity
• Shared SAN Storage
• 24x7 Operating System (OS)
• 24x7 Database Management

Key Benefits

Flamingo Pharmaceuticals realized the following benefits from its partnership with NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India:

• Complete technology refresh led to improved application (SAP) performance levels
• Hosting SAP application led to increased manageability of internal operations at Flamingo as the company could now focus on more strategic business issues
• Savings of 40% in overall cost as compared to setting up a captive datacenter to host their SAP application
• High availability of the SAP application ensured smooth functioning of business operations
• 24x7 monitoring and management of SAP application and faster turnaround time for issue resolution lead to enhanced performance levels
• A dedicated team to resolve issues lead to improved service levels and predictability
• Flexible utility model for SAP support and operations – the ability to increase or reduce the storage space on-demand, add or reduce users on demand has brought significant cost efficiencies for Flamingo

Business Scenario

Flamingo’s SAP application was running on HP UNIX platform and Oracle database. Hosting and managing the application, Operating System (OS) and Oracle database internally became a challenge for Flamingo and the company did not want to invest in setting up an infrastructure or the resources to manage it. This led to their decision to look for a managed IT hosting service provider.

Says Abdulla Fatiya, GM-IT, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals, "We wanted to outsource the hosting and management of our SAP ERP application from the very beginning. We are in the pharmaceuticals business so setting up and managing a datacenter internally to host this application is not our core competency. Besides, we would have had to make huge investments for setting up a datacenter, right from space, procuring hardware, maintenance, cooling, power and skilled resources to manage it 24x7. So we decided to look for a hosting service provider who could host and manage our SAP ERP application, provide us with the scalability to increase or decrease the number of users on-demand and help us move from a CapEx to an OpEx model."

Value Proposition

Says Abdulla Fatiya, GM-IT, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals, "We evaluated other service providers also but we found NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, to be better when compared with others. The technical expertise of NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India's team was impressive especially their knowledge of various Operating Systems and expertise in migration of SAP applications. The commitment of the entire NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, team and the fact that they are a pure play hosting and datacenter services provider was another reason that made us choose NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, as our hosting service provider. Besides NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, is a SAP certified hosting services partner as well."

Flamingo chose comprehensive datacenter hosting services that include dedicated servers with OS and database support. "Our complete SAP application is hosted in NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India's datacenter. This includes our production servers, solution development servers and enterprise portal," says Abdulla Fatiya

Working on a pay-as-you-use model, Flamingo has been able to save on costs associated with setting up and managing a datacenter on its own. "We wanted a highly available, secure and scalable IT environment for our SAP application. Building that environment and setting up a team with the required skill sets and training was not a viable option as it would have been very capital intensive for us. NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, provided us with the option of a pay as you use model, which suited our needs."

Says Abdulla Fatiya, GM-IT, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals, "Our Annual Maintenance Contract (AMC) and license fee for hardware was due for renewal. Instead of going for renewal of the AMC, we wanted to have a fixed cash outflow but within the budget that we already were spending. NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, advised us on the sizing of the hardware to host our SAP application, suitability of the operating system, design of the IT environment, what hardware to use, how to combine two instances of development and quality on one single hardware, what would help us save cost and devising a backup strategy for our data. Following their advice we have now moved to a managed dedicated server hosting where the servers that run SAP application belong to NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India. We have also shifted from HP UNIX OS to LINUX OS."

He further adds, "The solution suggested by NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, has shown us great results in terms of Return on Investment (ROI). It was customized to our requirements keeping in mind our monthly cash outflows."

Key Takeaways

Flamingo Pharmaceuticals is very satisfied with the highly available and scalable IT environment NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India, has provided for hosting its SAP application. The company has been able to save 40% of the costs that it would have had to incur if it invested in setting up its own datacenter and hiring skilled resources to manage it.

Says Abdulla Fatiya, GM-IT, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals, "We have not faced any downtime for our SAP application till now. 24x7 monitoring and management support at the OS level, as well as, for SAP application ensures that bottlenecks are detected and taken care of before anything happens. Turnaround times (TAT) have improved significantly and a dedicated team ensures that issues (if any) are resolved faster and in real time."

Flexibility to scale up resources on-demand is another benefit that Flamingo has derived out of its association with NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India. "We recently had to add another 500 GB to our existing storage with NTT Global Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure, India. All that it required was to fill in a requisition form and our storage capacity was increased within a matter of 2-3 days.We have recently set up a manufacturing facility at Nanded, which means that we will be adding another 100 users to the existing 125 users using the SAP application. Scalability to provision resources on demand and the speed with which this scalability is being offered to us is impressive."