Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Pfizer has undertaken a spate of acquisitions in the last few years. Obviously, the network as well as the hardware and the software applications too have undergone a consolidation phase.

Pfizer recognizes IT as a highly critical functional component of the business itself. A five-year strategic roadmap was planned in the year 2002, with the first two phases being applications and database consolidation.

Access to BI solutions was limited to a few key decision makers in Pfizer, but now BI capabilities will be extended to almost every user. The company is also institutionalizing enterprise project management technologies. This will ensure complete visibility into the inter-dependencies of projects.

In Pfizer, the SFA (sales force automation) and the order processing applications, are hosted at an Internet Data Center (IDC). The Mumbai HQ is linked to the IDC with a 2Mbps leased line connectivity with a similar setup of servers running the applications housed at the headquarters. The exchange is neither time-based replication nor synchronization, but is triggered by an event of data being appended or changed at either of the locations. This avoids data inconsistencies and time-gap issues, and at any point of time, the LAN-bandwidth utilization remains nominal.

The manufacturing plant at Turbhe runs MAPS on an AS/400 server. There are more than 40 servers at present, mainly from IBM, running various applications for Pfizer India. The Sun Systems Financial application continues to handle financial transactions and computations for the enterprise. Pfizer has a database running on MS SQL 2000 and 2003. It has also deployed enterprise-wide Active Directory feature of Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 server platform and all its Intranet applications, such as a few key performance indicators, dashboards, HR portal and more are integrated to the Active Directory, so that the company can enable single sign-in for its employees.

In addition to the Checkpoint firewalls for security, Pfizer now has an IDS in place. Mail servers are migrating to Exchange 2003, running TrendMicro ScanMail. McAfee's e-Policy Orchestrator is in use for policy management, and nearly all the laptops and desktops in the enterprise now run McAfee Personal Firewall. While tapes are used for additional data redundancy, a DR site acting as a hot standby has also come up.

Page(s)   1