Headquartered in Mumbai, Hikal Limited is partner to companies in the Pharmaceuticals, Biotech, Agrochemicals and Specialty Chemical industries providing Active Ingredients, Intermediates and R&D services and solutions. The company has a market cap of Rs. 756.24 crores.


Almost all industries today have got most of their operations computerized; not just the big pharmacy companies but also the mid level pharmaceuticals. About 70 percent of the small and medium enterprises utilize automation in one form or the other. Software systems are being increasingly accepted as an essential part of modern and progressive pharmacy industry. In this era of Information Technology there are several technology needs that are not being satisfactorily met by the current solutions provided by the vendors. Data security is one of the concerns where there are several players offering various solutions to the organizations and there is no single window where a customer can find a complete security solution for an organization. Network connectivity is another issue where every network player is good up to ‘B’ class cities across India but connectivity to Industrial belts near ‘A’ class cities in India is not satisfactorily established till-date. Mobile connectivity in ‘A’ class cities is also deteriorating day by day. Service providers guarantee for connectivity uptime but hardly offer a quality of connectivity.

Overcoming Adaptability issues of New Technologies
Pharmaceutical Industry is growing in India and there are many competitive players in the market. CIOs need to be on their toes to keep up with the pace of technological advancements. Any technology must stay for a minimum of 6-9 months before new upgrades arrive in the industry. This leads to users’ dissatisfaction and continuous investment in technology upgrade. There are multiple upgrades that are created in the technology area which are not satisfactory to organizations’ needs every-time. As a result, senior management always demands an upgrade in the technology while it is nearly impossible to provide new technology frequently. Every application provider must offer some path forward to upgrade their latest offering before stopping service support. The offer should be economically viable for an organization. As the adaptability to new technology is a tricky situation, while on one hand user wants latest technology; on the other hand they are reluctant to adapt to the technology even after multiple training sessions.

Weighing the Options
The organizations need to take multiple steps to ensure that the incumbent technology is upgraded to the state-of-the-art technology by following the simple commandment that 20 percent of the capital budget must be reserved for technology upgrade in an organization and IT heads must allocate to themselves the important work of reviewing new technologies. There are many outstanding trends which have emerged in the present day technology landscape. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) has shown a decent impact and this component in Cloud offering will lead the technology in the days to come. Many companies are not investing for data centre in their own offices; rather they are ready to adopt this wise technology. Considering the current business requirement of 24x7 availability and accessibility from anywhere for IT enabled services, IaaS is best suited answer to meet the requirement. Weighing on an economical basis IaaS will score more than owning data centre in the premises. Joining the race is SaaS (Software as a Service), which is gradually picking up and will gain momentum within a year or two. Services like mail filtering or security management had been adopted by industry while moving applications to cloud is under momentum. Organizations can use SaaS in mail filtering to avoid spam mails and it can turn out to be a good option to adopt CRM (Consumer Relationship management) on cloud, making operations savvy. However, a serious care must be taken while the data is being transported to the cloud.

BYOD has a Long Way to Go
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is another technology which gives an opportunity for the employees to use their own platform in the work environment. Internal as well as external customers have compelled IT managers to adopt this technology to full scale. Smart phones, Tabs and Ipads are major devices which users like to bring and integrate with company database. But unfortunately, this technology has not yet matured to its optimum level of usage and may require several upgrades to meet IT Managers’ requirements. However this technology is bound to stay for long and will be adopted by IT managers in the near future. (As told to Mujeeb Jeelani)