The pharmaceutical industry in India is going through heady days. With business volumes expected to rise, storage needs are poised to grow. Our survey indicated that storage, inter alia, received the top spending priority by the CIOs who participated in our survey.
About 57 percent of the CIOs we interviewed from the pharmaceutical sector rated storage as the priority spending area along with information security, customer-facing applications, network management and systems integration.
“We have a lot more business coming into India especially for technical trials and would need to ramp up our storage to accommodate the same,” says Radhakrishna Pil-lai, CIO, SRL Ranbaxy.
Companies are already witnessing a surge in stored data. According to a top Biocon official, the company had one terabyte of stored data on its systems this year. “As per our estimates, 2007 will see an increase in another terabyte,” says Radhakrishnan Menon, Group Head - IT, Biocon. The other factor that would boost the storage market is the exponential increase in drug discovery data.
Further, companies going for standards’ compliance have found their storage capacities being reinforced. For instance, Pillai notes, because SRL Ranbaxy is accredited by the College of American Pathology, the company’s storage system has to ensure that patient information can be retrieved within four hours time.
Industry scan
The Indian pharmaceutical sector has been registering decent growth figures owing to the global pharmaceutical brands coming off- patent. Major biopharmaceutical drugs have already come off- patent in 2004-06, and as per industry estimates, drugs worth $ 70 billion are expected to come off-patent over the next few years. “Indian bio-generic drug manufacturers are already gearing up to grab a significant share offered by these opportunities,” says Dr Jayashree Mapari, Industry Analyst, Healthcare Practice, Frost & Sullivan.
The other factor that’s driving growth is the widening scope of offshore Research & Development (R&D) opportunities in India. Paresh Vaish, Director of the Boston Consulting Group in India says that Indian pharma companies are well positioned to generate fast value for global pharma players by taking on contract research and clinical trial work.
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Paresh enjoys the challenge of helping Indian companies globalize and become truly world class in everything they do. He is also extremely passionate about India and works actively with a Non Profit Organization, Pratham, which seeks to universalize primary education in India.
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