Otsuka Pharmaceuticals

Leading pharmaceutical company selects Teneo For Riverbed rollout.

Otsuka Pharmaceutical Europe Ltd is part of Otsuka, one of the largest research-based healthcare companies in Japan. Established in Europe in 1998 to register and market Otsuka’s products in key European markets, the company employs 300 staff across 6 countries.

The European head office in Uxbridge hosts the main data centre server which services all affiliates. The data centre serves 300 staff with a 10Mbps link at the main site and 4Mbps link at the other sites, all connected via leased lines. The majority of sites in Europe are serverless sites which access the head office via VPN Tunnels. Due to the serverless architecture all offices are totally reliant on systems being available.

The main applications used include Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Formerly Microsoft Navision), Terminal Services for Finance, Microsoft SharePoint (for Intranet) Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft ISA server for internet proxy and file share access.

The challenge

Users experienced long delays when accessing applications. Dramatic acceleration required for key applications.

Ali Khan, IT Manager for Europe had been newly recruited to the role and was responsible for managing and developing IT for Otsuka Europe. From day one he faced the challenge of dissatisfied users across the whole organization as a result of poor application performance. Microsoft Dynamics NAV in particular was painfully slow.

Ali described the situation, “The IT team had received reports for some time of poor performance in particular when users were trying to access data across the WAN. Application performance was throttled, Internet access was slow and it had created dissatisfaction and resentment among end users. Microsoft NAV Jet reports typically were 25-30MB of data and were taking as long as 10-15 minutes to push across!”

Users at Otsuka were reliant on business critical applications being available at a workable speed. The IT team noticed that over a period of time users complained of slow performance on key financial transactions. There was huge dissatisfaction among users who worked solely on these systems as a part of their daily role.

Ali added that, Bad IT gives other departments a poor view of the IT function. File access and data storage had become a real ‘bug bear’ in their frustration users had taken matters into their own hands and disabled synchronization with the associated risk to the business of data loss.

Poor performance hindered collaboration between sites. A consolidated infrastructure model was in place. However consolidation produced performance problems caused by latency over the wide area network (WAN). This lag caused applications to become unacceptably slow and threatened the success of an otherwise cost effective and efficient IT initiative.

Due to these problems talks had been set up previous to Ali’s arrival to help resolve these issues by de-centralization of the IT infrastructure. Ali opposed this move, estimating around 10,000 Euros for increased services and running costs and concluded that de-centralization would be both costly and inefficient.

Ali had experience from his previous role within a pharmaceutical company who had undergone a 200 site roll out of Riverbed Steelheads. He knew that it was not necessary to de-centralize and that Riverbed technology could resolve this contentious matter as well as the mass of other ‘headaches’ caused by poor application performance.

“Having already recently experienced a WAN optimization project the groundwork of looking at bandwidth upgrades and all available technologies on the market had been researched fully. The findings concluded that Riverbed was by far the best solution.”

The solution

Deployment Of Riverbed Steelhead appliances.

After careful consideration of Otsuka's particular issues, goals and IT aspirations, Teneo and Ali were confident that Riverbed Steelhead appliances would provide an effective solution.

Ali also attended one of Teneo’s WAN optimization seminars which focussed on using Riverbed technology to help virtualize and consolidate IT.

Teneo is an award winning infrastructure optimization specialist, providing solutions that help customers with the management, performance and virtualization of their IT systems.

Teneo’s focussed approach of understanding business goals and matching them to efficient IT solutions ensures that IT infrastructure is truly optimized, leading to improved performance, greater user productivity and lower overall IT costs.

Riverbed technology encompasses several different product areas unlike individual approaches that only address one single cause of poor application performance.

Riverbed accelerates all the most commonly used applications and offered a perfect fit for all of Otsuka’s applications. Teneo recommended a proof of concept trial.

“The results were immediately apparent. Jet Reports which took minutes were now passing though in about 15 seconds. Performance increases were found for all applications. The French office could immediately see that Riverbed offered a resolution without having to decentralize.”

Benefits

Substantial cost savings, increased IT efficiency, inter-office collaboration and a happy productive workforce.

“There are a number of hard cost savings associated with this technology. The bandwidth saving is only half the story. It has enabled us to maintain a consolidated IT infrastructure and given us the ability to virtualize and back up over the WAN. This couldn’t be achieved without the performance boost of the Steelheads.” noted Ali.

Ali was keen to embark on a virtualization project in order to increase efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT within the organization. Virtualization produces huge benefits, in terms of the green issues, cost effectiveness and use of resources. Slow application performance was hampering their ability to virtualize. With Riverbed Steelheads in place performance issues have been addressed making virtualization possible.

Otsuka like most organizations needs to be able to extract greater productivity from fewer people and needs to make sure staff have fast access to information and applications. IT has been leveraged to successfully optimize business efficiency and achieve IT and business goals.

Ali concluded, “The profile of IT has been raised within the organization. We have put an end to frustrated users while avoiding expensive bandwidth upgrades. Deploying the Steelheads has been a ‘win win’ situation reducing costs while also improving business efficiency.