EVA Pharma fulfills unmet medical needs with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
One of the fastest-growing pharma companies in MEA deploys OCI to increase scalability and application security, as well as simplify backup.
“Each day, our medicines reach over a million people around the world. To achieve this, we use innovations across the entire value chain. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure secured the flexibility, efficiency, and on-demand scalability needed for sustainable growth, and to better manage the infrastructure for our varying workloads. The overall result was significant performance improvements and cost reductions.”
Business challenges
Over the last three years, EVA Pharma has responded to challenges created by COVID by expanding production to a million product packages daily and delivering essential medications to nearly 60 countries. With the company growing at a compound annual rate of 27.6%, its on-premises IT infrastructure was struggling to keep pace.
Network and server administration for its growing Oracle E-Business Suite platform on-premises was becoming increasingly cumbersome. Backups required lengthy manual processes and management of third-party solutions. Cloning took up to a week and was conducted outside of working hours. Provisioning DevTest instances was long and arduous, hindering innovation. Disaster recovery was also suboptimal, with unstable network issues resulting in out-of-sync servers. The company’s IT infrastructure and management costs were rising.
EVA Pharma wanted a strong, reliable, and highly scalable infrastructure to facilitate the expansion of its subsidiaries and factories in other countries, and to meet its goal of becoming one of the top 20 healthcare organizations globally, with a sizable contribution in the MEA region.
OCI reduced our costs by 47%, improving our ROI due to its great stability and scalability. Engagement from Oracle Cloud Lift Services was also a key factor.
Why EVA Pharma chose Oracle
EVA Pharma evaluated solutions from multiple vendors, focusing on usability, cost, flexibility, and the range of services provided. Ultimately, the company selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as the best fit due to its superior performance with E-Business Suite and its advanced related services. For example, Oracle Enterprise Database Service would automate backups and simplify patching and upgrading, while E-Business Suite Cloud Manager would reduce cloning time and accelerate provisioning.
The company was also impressed with OCI’s low-cost, on-demand scalability, and low-latency, high-bandwidth network between regional data centers.
After the OCI and Oracle Data Guard deployment, EVA Pharma not only avoided any latency problems, but it also automatically routed traffic to increase application availability.
Results
After migrating its critical E-Business Suite platform to OCI EVA Pharma saved significant costs, after already reducing its total cost of ownership by almost half. With OCI, the company gained the scalability needed to meet its immediate and long-term growth needs. It provisioned compute instances in minutes to accommodate new workloads, and scaled CPU and memory on-demand during closing periods and other times of peak activity.
EVA Pharma’s disaster recovery setup improved considerably by using the OCI data center in Frankfurt as a primary site, along with a secondary site in Dubai for compliance purposes. After building and configuring Oracle Active Data Guard between the OCI regions, the pharmaceutical company’s disaster recovery ran in perfect synchronization, without a single network or latency issue. Application availability also increased by using Oracle’s Virtual Cloud Network and OCI Load Balancer to automatically route traffic between infrastructure locations. Database cloning, which previously took a week and needed to be performed outside of business hours, is now completed in a single day during a live environment using E-Business Suite Cloud Manager on OCI.
Oracle Enterprise Database Service enabled EVA Pharma to easily and cost effectively build, scale, and secure Oracle databases for E-Business Suite. In addition, the company saw improved block storage performance with OCI in terms of input/output operations per second as well as throughput, which reduced the time to run management reports.
Database administrators no longer rely on manual RMAN scripts and third-party solutions for backups because they are now automated with a single click using Oracle Database Cloud Service. Archive backup processes were simplified with OCI’s object and archive storages, which can be backed up to different locations and accessed instantly.
With the Oracle Cloud implementation, EVA Pharma’s IT infrastructure specialists are free to work on more strategic tasks because they no longer need to spend time and effort resolving networking and server problems, which are fully managed by Oracle to ensure the best performance.
Oracle Cloud Lift Services worked closely with EVA Pharma’s engineers to perform the migration within two months and ensure a smooth transition.
About the customer
One of the fastest-growing healthcare companies in the MEA region, EVA Pharma empowers the fight for health in more than 40 countries.
The company produces more than a million doses of medication daily at its internationally accredited manufacturing facilities. With an emphasis on investing in innovative research, EVA Pharma’s product portfolio includes categories such as neurology, psychiatry, cardiovascular, orthopedics, GIT, pediatrics, urology, and dermatology.