SAP hosting services from Netmagic enable Flamingo Pharmaceuticals to save 40 per cent on Capex

Flamingo Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1985 as Flamingo Impex. The company has two manufacturing units located in 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 five 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.

Industry Manufacturing– Healthcare Pharmaceuticals

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 realised that supporting and hosting the application internally would involve large capital expenditure for setting up a data centre and recruiting skilled resources to manage it 24×7. 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 data centre hosting services for SAP ERP, colocation with operating system (OS) and database support.

• Solution snapshot
• Dedicated server hosting
• Dedicated firewall services
• Bandwidth and connectivity
• Shared SAN storage
• 24×7 OS
• 24×7 database management

“On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Netmagic 8 for the expertise of its technical team, service delivery, IT infrastructure environment and data centre security and maintenance. Netmagic’s vision is very clear and over the last three to four years, it has emerged as a strong brand. Netmagic is the best when it comes to outsourcing your IT infrastructure to an external service provider,” says Abdulla Fatiya, GM-IT, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals.

Flamingo Pharmaceuticals wanted to focus their internal resources on expanding and growing their core business rather than setting and managing a data centre to host their SAP ERP application. How did Netmagic Solutions help them achieve their objective?

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.

Abdulla Fatiya, GM-IT, Flamingo Pharmaceuticals, says, “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 data centre internally to host this application is not our core competency. Besides, we would have had to make huge investments for setting up a data centre, right from space, procuring hardware, maintenance, cooling, power and skilled resources to manage it 24×7. 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

Fatiya further says, “We evaluated other service providers also but we found Netmagic to be better when compared with others. The technical expertise of Netmagic’s team was impressive especially their knowledge of various OS and expertise in migration of SAP applications. The commitment of the entire Netmagic team and the fact that they are a pure play hosting and data centre services provider was another reason that made us choose Netmagic as our hosting service provider. Besides Netmagic is a SAP certified hosting services partner as well.”

Flamingo chose comprehensive data centre hosting services that include dedicated servers with OS and database support. “Our complete SAP application is hosted in Netmagic’s data centre. This includes our production servers, solution development servers and enterprise portal,” says Fatiya.

Working on a pay-as-you-use model, Flamingo has been able to save on costs associated with setting up and managing a data centre 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. Netmagic provided us with the option of a pay as you use model, which suited our needs.”

“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. Netmagic 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 Netmagic. We have also shifted from HP UNIX OS to LINUX OS,” says Fatiya.

He further adds, “The solution suggested by Netmagic has shown us great results in terms of return on investment (ROI). It was customised 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 Netmagic has provided for hosting its SAP application. The company has been able to save 40 per cent of the costs that it would have had to incur if it invested in setting up its own data centre and hiring skilled resources to manage it.

Fatiya also says, “We have not faced any downtime for our SAP application till now. 24×7 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 Netmagic. “We recently had to add another 500 GB to our existing storage with Netmagic. All that it required was to fill in a requisition form and our storage capacity was increased within a matter of two to three 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.”