SIRO gets IT solutions from Sun and Oracle

Suja Nair - Mumbai

SIRO Clinpharm (SIRO), has decided to implement a new IT framework comprising Oracle's Life Sciences Applications (OLSA) and its other applications running on Sun Microsystems' hardware platform. This IT infrastructure will be implemented by DBMS Consulting, a member of the Oracle partner network. This new IT system is expected to bring about greater efficiency and increased customer focus in SIRO's operations. The new system will touch and impact over 500 SIRO clinical researchers involved in more than 150 clinical studies. SIRO will implement OLSA as a complete electronic information environment, for gathering and reporting clinical data. Besides reducing errors, OLSA will enable SIRO to speed information gathering and reduce the need for paper documentation.

Dr Chetan Tamhankar, Chief Operating Officer, SIRO said, "We are growing at an aggressive rate for the last three years. To sustain our growth plans, we are looking at both organic and inorganic growth options across the globe. Oracle will help us achieve this by delivering a powerful combination of technology and comprehensive business applications, and key functionality built specifically to address the nuances of the CRO industry."

Speaking on investment he added that the company is investing $ 3 million in its first year, which is gradually going to increase over the years. On SIRO's choice of Oracle and Sun he said, "After extensive assessment we found that Oracle and Sun had a high customer satisfaction rate and are the best in providing IT solutions and rest is history."

Vishnu Banka, Senior Vice President, Finance and Corporate Strategy, SIRO said, "SIRO will use the new IT infrastructure to provide better efficiencies and better feedback to clients. The application suite will also help us integrate our expanding global operations. We will be able to track, monitor and ensure optimum utilisation of our resources across locations. We found the combination of OLSA and Sun's hardware best suited to our rapid growth requirements and our needs for continued regulatory compliance. DBMS' domain knowledge and Oracle implementation skills gave us the comfort to embark on this ambitious project."

According to Rajesh Rege, Director Sales, Sun Microsystems, "The CRO industry has unique technology requirements in data mining, data warehousing, and enterprise application integration functions. This discipline requires systems that offer them robust performance and are scalable to address the exponential growth in their data. Sun Microsystems infrastructure platform supporting an Oracle solution will help SIRO to optimise their technology infrastructure and respond to regulatory and competitive pressures, and enable greater use of tools to automate collection, searchability, transmittal, and storage of data." He further added, "Sun products and technologies are compliant with regulatory mandates for harmonisation of data exchange and this will continue to power the transformation of research into radically improved medical care."

According to Callum Bir, Director, Life sciences Global Industry Business Unit Oracle Corporation, Asia Pacific and Japan, "The Indian CROs and pharma companies are striving to be at par with their Western counterparts with regards to standard and quality without any compromises. And that is the main reason for them to increasingly depend on IT solution to leverage quality services. They want the best IT solution available in the market and we are here to provide the same."

"All ten of the world's top CROs use Oracle applications," said Nitin Paranjpe, Director for Applications Sales, Oracle India "SIRO's new IT infrastructure with OLSA provides them with a greater competitive advantage in providing clinical research services to the global life sciences industry." OLSAs for clinical development provide a streamlined system for managing large volumes of patient data collected during clinical trials. These applications offer features for modelling clinical studies, capturing and managing clinical data, managing clinical trials, and capturing and reporting adverse events. SIRO will be using Sun's Intel offering for application servers, RISC (UNIX) based solution which projected the best scalability, reliability and availability, along with Solaris' ten operating system for database layer and Sun blade servers with Intel Quad Core processors for consolidating their existing edge servers into one window management. For storage, SIRO will use Sun's SAN solution along with SL48 tape library for backup. Sun was the single vendor that could provide x64 platform for App layer, RISC systems for Database layer, primary and secondary storage and backup solutions.

suja.nair@expressindia.com