By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
U.K.-based AstraZeneca PLC announced Monday that it will be spinning up its new technology center in Chennai, India by the end of February. The Asia Pacific SAP Enterprise Central Component (ECC) currently has about 300 staffers, but is expected to bring on another 700 IT specialists to support the company’s remaining seven ECCs by 2016.
Essentially, AstraZeneca is insourcing its IT. “It’s a quick ramp-up,” said AstraZeneca’s Jonathan Charles in a statement. “By the end of this year, support for all SAP systems will be done from Chennai in-house. That’s one of the reasons behind the drive toward standardization. We can’t have eight ways of doing things in eight different systems.”
According to AstraZeneca’s Chief Information Officer David Smoley, bringing information technology in-house is a growing trend. In late 2014 the company outsourced about 70 percent of its IT, but has plans to decrease that number to about 30 percent.
“Twenty years ago it would have made sense to outsource work as a process needed 200-300 people,” said Smoley in a statement. “But it is no longer the case with the advent of mobile and cloud technologies. The third parties tend to focus on their own profit margin and not on AstraZeneca. And you end up dealing with too many people and delaying the drug delivery process.”
AstraZeneca’s global IT budget is approximately $1.3 billion annually. The company has plans to cut that budget in half over the next several years.
The Chennai operation supports 51,500 employees worldwide. The company has plans to open two other centers, one in California and the other in Eastern Europe. The centers will handle SAP, infrastructure operations and network monitoring, application development and maintenance, and cloud and mobile. It is currently hiring IT professionals for its Indian center.
The company also announced today that it had been granted planning permission for new global research and development and corporate headquarters in Cambridge, U.K. It will be located on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and about 2,000 people will work there.
“Work is underway to prepare the site on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and we look forward to beginning construction in the spring,” said Mene Pangalos, executive vice president, Innovative Medicines & Early Development at AstraZeneca in a statement. “Our aim is to create an open, welcoming and vibrant center that will inspire our teams and partners to push the boundaries of scientific innovation for the benefit of patients.”
