February 20, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Novartis AG , headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, announced yesterday that it will be consolidating its Latin America IT services into a new facility in Churubusco, Mexico City, Mexico.
The older facility did not provide the company with the needed controls and compliance. “Prior to the development of the new data center in Mexico,” said Ivan Breton, physical data center administrator for Novartis in Mexico in a statement, “we had a Tier III data center that prevented the growth of the company.”
Recently the company announced it was closing its manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico by 2019 and laying off 270 employees. It also established a joint investment company with Qualcomm Ventures, the venture investment group of Qualcomm Incorporated, which will fund up to $100 million to support early stage companies.
Insourcing IT appears to be a new trend in the biopharma industry. Early this month U.K.-based AstraZeneca PLC announced it was launching a new technology center in Chennai, India late this month. The Asia Pacific SAP Enterprise Central Component (ECC) has about 300 employees, but by 2015 is expected to hire another 700 IT specialists.
“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.”
The Novartis IT center in Mexico will also house its Latin America business units of Sandoz and Novartis Animal Health, and some human resources functions.
The new facility garnered the IT team at Novartis a prize in the 2014 Latam IT Awards. It was also a finalist in the DatacenterDynamics Latam Awards 2014 in the category of Innovation in the Medium Data Center.
The new data center has a modular design, which is expandable. Consolidating the server farm resulted in a reduction by 30 percent. The current server farm contains more than 60 active services, but is estimated to be only about 35 percent of total capacity.
Although the new data center is in-house, it also outsources some of its operations. “An external provider manages the total operation of the services,” said Breton in a statement. That includes activities like switching servers on and off and verifying backups.
The data center is cited for its use of advanced technologies for environmental protection, including motion-activated lights, “in-row cooling” and fire detection and suppression systems. The fire suppression system utilizes Ecaro-25, which can slow or stop a fire without harming people or the ozone later. The server racks also are set up with hot and cold aisles so that cooling can be concentrated where it’s most needed.
BioSpace Temperature Poll
Will Job Cuts Continue? After a week that saw Quintiles, Sanofi and Actavis slashing almost a 1,000 biotech jobs, BioSpace wonders if the ax will continue to fall. Give us your thoughts about the sector’s “streamlining” below.
