Induquímica Laboratorios

Streamlining the Business of Science

By Frank Lacombe

Mac minis schedule manufacturing processes in the pharmaceutical production facility.

Forensic DNA analysis and genomic research demand cutting-edge computational capacity. Nobody knows that better than Christian Quintanilla Aurich, the dynamic young general manager of Induquímica Laboratorios, S.A, in Lima, Peru. When Quintanilla joined the company last year, he found himself at the helm of an organization that had grown from a small producer of natural healthcare products to the fifth largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in Peru in ten short years.

“All that dynamic expansion occurred despite a costly and unwieldy Windows-based computer system that was plagued by high-maintenance costs, server crashes, and all kinds of other operational inefficiencies,” says Quintanilla. “But today’s future-looking biotech business opportunities require vastly more in the way of computational resources. The more we studied our strategic needs, the better we liked what we saw in the UNIX-based Mac platform.”

Among the company’s potential compute-intensive business opportunities are Peruvian government contracts for performing forensic DNA analysis, as well as providing biomedical services that require advanced genomic data analysis. Induquímica, which employs 190 people worldwide and markets its products in 27 countries, is also exploring FDA certification to allow it to expand into the lucrative U.S. pharmaceutical market.

“I decided that even if we absolutely had to run Microsoft Windows in the short term, I’d still rather have everything — including Windows — running on the same Mac hardware.”

In order to pursue such prospects, the company is making a complete transition from Microsoft Windows to an exclusively Mac infrastructure. “This change may seem radical,” Quintanilla admits. “But it is essential if we’re going to realize our ultimate corporate vision of moving beyond merely manufacturing pharmaceuticals to handling the drug discovery process ourselves.”

Induquímica’s proprietary WinLedger application running in a Virtual PC window.

Replacing an Infrastructure

“When I arrived at Induquímica, we were running desktop PCs and servers assembled to our specifications by local vendors,” Quintanilla recalls. “Whatever we saved on hardware we paid back many times over in annual server license fees. Simply from a cost standpoint, the unlimited-user version of the Mac OS X Server was very appealing.”

IT manager Orlando Barrón Galarza points out how the old system wasted time as well as money: “Because we were unable to implement IMAP email, three fulltime IT people spent four days every week backing up company data, most of it POP email residing on client machines. That left them only one day to work on other projects. Nobody was happy with that arrangement.”

“I was convinced that the mail, file, and other services in the UNIX-based Mac OS X Server would be the best solution to our current IT headaches, as well as providing a solid foundation for our future research needs,” Quintanilla adds. “But there was one significant roadblock. Some of the applications we depend right now on are only available for Microsoft Windows.”

Although someone with less Mac experience than Quintanilla might have stopped there, he approached the roadblock as an engineering challenge. After an assessment of their applications, he determined that Mac equivalents of Windows-only applications were readily available and that many of those that weren’t were non-essential or simple enough to be developed in-house.

The only application that was both essential and unavailable for the Mac was SAP Business One. But Quintanilla learned that a Mac-compatible version of that application would be available for the South American market at the beginning of next year. So the only question was whether the transition to Macs would have to be put on hold until the Mac-compatible version of SAP Business One was released. Or could Macs running Windows successfully run the SAP application now?

Barrón’s IT staff ran a series of technical and usability tests to answer that question. They determined that those users who needed to access the SAP Business One application could do so very effectively from their Macs, using Virtual PC.

“This hybrid solution lets us immediately take advantage of the cost savings and performance enhancements of the Mac platform and begin developing the high-performance computational infrastructure we need,” says Quintanilla. “The 70 Windows licenses we already own are more than sufficient for our needs, and within the year we’ll have no further need for them. Based on these considerations, I decided that even if we absolutely had to run Microsoft Windows in the short term, I’d still rather have everything — including Windows — running on the same Mac hardware.”

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At a Glance

The fifth largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in Peru and the country’s largest exporter of natural healthcare products, Induquímica Laboratorios is expanding into two scientific service markets — forensic DNA analysis and pharmaceutical genomic research — that require significant computational capacity. Three IT specialists were spending four days every week just to back up the individual POP email accounts for the company’s 190 employees. The annual client access licenses were expensive, too, and system downtime was unacceptably high.

Apple Solution

The company is in the process of replacing its entire Microsoft Windows computing infrastructure with Macs in order to reduce administrative overhead, eliminate client access license fees, and reduce downtime. When its computational cluster for scientific computing comes online next year, the company will use Xgrid to take advantage of the excess computational capacity of more than 90 desktop and laptop Macs. This will multiply its effective computational capacity at essentially no cost to the company and simultaneously provide a unified operating environment for scientists and business users alike.

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