Hundreds of legacy system. Automation to reduce costs and improve delivery timelines.
Headquartered in Copenhagen, NNIT is a subsidiary of the healthcare supplier Novo Nordisk NIT that has approximately 2,200 employees in five countries.
The corporate mission is to be a preferred international IT consulting and service company in regulated industries. NNIT’s life sciences service is the best example of this, but recently the business has branched out into renewable energy and the dairy industry.
As it continues to grow, NNIT has become increasingly international. It started serving the Chinese market in 2006. As an IT service provider, and as a global organization, the business challenge is to reduce costs and offer a wider range of value added services.
“The traditional thinking has been to outsource like-for-like to a lower cost environment, such as China or India,” says Jesper Bagh, cloud and automation subject matter expert, NNIT. “To go up another level the next step is not to outsource, but to automate these processes. Automation beats outsourcing.”
Bagh’s goal is to reduce manual work to zero, where possible: “Where we do things again and again, put it into script and automate it.”
This creates a virtuous circle, he points out. More customers are prepared to buy standardized services, meaning NNIT has the scale to create more automated processes. Automation brings the price down further, making the service more attractive still. It also means faster delivery times and less risk (with fewer human errors), resulting in an even lower price. It also creates an opportunity to win new business outside of regulated markets, with more mainstream, enterprise customers.
“The competitive edge on enterprise deals is mainly focused around automation,” says Bagh. “Automation is linked to our core strategy of being more agile and being able to deliver services faster.”
Jesper Bagh – CLOUD AND AUTOMATION SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT
NNIT
NNIT is a Danish IT service provider, with strength in the life sciences sector. A move to cloud-based services and wide-scale automation has reduced costs and improved delivery times. This has enabled the business to move into new markets, and standardize a global product offering.
In 2008, the IT team made a presentation to the management of NNIT outlining the advantages of moving to cloud-based solutions. Their argument centered on lower initial costs for solutions, lower running costs, greater agility, high audit and approval trails and repeatability. These elements would apply to NNIT internal operations, and the new generation of services for its customers.
With senior management bought in, the next step was to create a proof-of-concept. The team devised 54 criteria that had to be met: “At that stage, a request-for-proposal would have created what we thought we needed, and that might not be right. We wanted a standard solution.”
Micro Focus, IBM and a consortium of Cisco, EMC, VMware and BMC Software were given a week to provide answers. Bagh says: “it was clear no one had the exact solution as an existing offering, but it would be possible to combine elements to fit.” He was impressed, however, with the Micro Focus platform and its heterogeneous approach.
“Micro Focus scored highly in user case scenarios. With Micro Focus Operations Orchestration, Network Automation and Server Automation they have a strong provisioning suite, a strong automation suite – and this is what cloud is all about.
“Also, with Micro Focus it was just one company, one phone number.”
The full Micro Focus Software solution comprises Micro Focus Universal CMDB, Server Automation, Operations Bridge, Network Automation, Operations Orchestration and Cloud Service Automation.
This seamless combination was able to demonstrate the degree of automation possible across services and provisioning, increasing server utilization and improving IT efficiency. Micro Focus Network Automation software automates network change, configuration, and compliance management – which is vital given NNIT’s operations in strictly regulated industries. Cloud Service Automation made real what was really achievable, and showed how NNIT could truly integrate server, storage and network operations.
“What Micro Focus showed us was the future of the server and storage business through converged infrastructure. This is how the future will be sold: an automation suite across servers, storage and network,” says Bagh.
Jesper Bagh – CLOUD AND AUTOMATION SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT
NNIT
There have been both immediate and long term benefits. The deployment of virtual servers has been reduced from three days to one hour and then deployment of physical servers from five days to two hours.
This has enabled NNIT to preconfigure certain solutions, which in turn has created lower, more predictable costs and faster delivery times, internally and for customers. More predictability means stronger guarantees, which is a crucial component of NNIT’s service delivery.
Such certainty has allowed NNIT to open up a brand new market. Automation means it can now create solutions for customers with smaller budgets (<1 million, €140,000), previously priced out of NNIT’s offerings. “It’s a more efficient option for them and, hopefully, they’ll grow to be the size of our traditional customers,” says Bagh.
The bigger picture is that NNIT can now build a community of its life science customers in the cloud. It has developed the GxP Cloud, “the first cloud solution dedicated to the life sciences,” designed to meet the stringent standards of the pharmaceutical industry; the European Medicines Agency and its US-equivalent, the Food and Drug Administration. This enables NNIT to supply cheaper, standardized services via the cloud, making customers more agile and faster to market. Customers are able to see live information on how their services are running, rather than responding reactively.
Bagh says GxP Cloud may reduce validation costs by 80 per cent through faster, more agile deployment of solutions and IT process optimization. In addition users are better prepared for regulatory visits. GxP compiles and retrieves the relevant documents, saving time and easing management concerns.
“The vision is to focus on the full value chain of delivering a service, not only deploying a server, but being able to run it automatically and report to it automatically,” explains Bagh. “We’re trying to be more transparent in our services that we deliver to customers.”
Development of the life sciences market will lead NNIT’s growth, he says, but the same criteria that apply here (particularly regulation and data security) will also be increasingly significant in two other key markets: finance and public sector. “The financial market is in the same place life science was at in the 1950s. There were some terrible problems in the pharmaceutical industry; now you have a fully traceable system in place. I expect the financial market to require the same. Our life science model can be replicated there.”
