Apollo Pharmacy, Asia’s largest pharmacy retailer, migrated most of its critical backend systems and ancillary applications to Nutanix on-prem to support a hybrid cloud strategy and free up resources for next-gen applications.
Apollo Pharmacy is switching from a public cloud play to a hybrid cloud strategy. To support this, the company partially moved to on-prem and changed its Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning system to an on-prem Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution. It also launched proof of concepts for solutions like the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) and Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box.
After migrating Microsoft Dynamics to NCP, Apollo Pharmacy saw an improvement in performance speed by 1.7 times. This means that Apollo Pharmacy can now deliver customer service faster and provide more convenient services to its customers. The company has seen savings of up to 40-50%in total cost of ownership. Resources freed up were redirected to drive innovations.
Increased performance of business-critical apps
Gained 1.7 times greater speed for Microsoft Dynamics, boosting decision-making effectiveness
Launched hybrid cloud strategy
Successfully migrated Microsoft Dynamics to on-prem Nutanix to establish a hybrid-cloud foundation
Freed up resources
Reduced total cost of ownership for IT by up to 40-50%, releasing funds for other critical implementations
We are achieving greater performance from critical workloads connected to supply chain management and ancillary systems in Nutanix while building a highly agile foundation for our hybrid cloud strategy that can handle massive application workloads.
Apollo Pharmacy operates the largest omnichannel pharmacy in Asia, with a network of more than 6,300 stores across 27 states. The systems behind its store network contain more than 19,000 pin codes and 230000 SKU and process over 300 million prescriptions annually. Its e-commerce platform Apollo 247 manages approximately 120 million line-items available for the omnichannel orders.
Apollo Pharmacy’s IT strategy had been based on a public cloud-only strategy for several years. Hyperscalers have supported business-critical applications like the company’s Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. However, to gain greater flexibility and control, the company wanted to leverage private clouds as part of a change to a hybrid infrastructure.
CG Balaji, CIO of Apollo Pharmacies Limited, explains, “We have heavy workloads to manage in the cloud environment for each workload and we wanted the possibility to move those to alternative clouds whenever needed.” Besides moving to a hybrid cloud, Apollo Pharmacy also wanted to explore high-capacity GPU to use securely, quickly and efficiently. “It was important for us to get our machine learning algorithm in a compliant, cost-effective computing environment,” he said.
Apollo Pharmacy engaged with Nutanix to support its hybrid strategy. It began deploying the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution and migrated its ERP and ancillary systems to on-premises. After successfully migrating Microsoft Dynamics and accompanying Microsoft SQL Server databases, the IT team switched inventory management and front-end web applications to the NCP.
The company leverages AOS storage natively within the NCP and the Nutanix AHV hypervisor to simplify management while maintaining high security. It also uses Nutanix Prism to simplify management across the infrastructure.
Apollo Pharmacy has recently completed proof of concept for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) product to administer disaster recovery (DR) workloads across multiple clouds for lightning-quick restores. It has also started evaluating Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box to drive experimentation for multiple machine learning use cases. Balaji says, “The pace of change across IT is accelerating right now, but with Nutanix, we can deliver on our current hybrid cloud strategy while maintaining a speed of innovation that will remain in step with new developments.”
Improved performance for more effective operations
By migrating to Nutanix, Apollo Pharmacy saw ERP processing speeds increase 1.7 times, delivering a vital performance boost to personnel. With ERP empowering decision-making, employees gain faster operational insights, which they can use to make timely and better-informed choices to gain a competitive edge. “Employees can quickly access performance data anywhere, at any time, to ensure we’re delivering the greatest value possible to our customers,” said Balaji.
More convenient and timely customer service
Nutanix’s performance and flexibility are helping Apollo Pharmacy take customer service to the next level. Supporting Apollo Pharmacy is a considerable healthcare ecosystem featuring hospitals, clinics, diagnostic services, insurers, and offline and online pharmacies. Using Nutanix, the company has brought that ecosystem into a single digital healthcare platform called Apollo 247. Moreover, it has built a mobile app with more than 10 million subscribers to provide convenient and timely service access, ensuring the availability of millions of inventory records in real time for customer visibility and ordering. “Almost 35% of India’s population is Gen Z,” said Balaji. “With Nutanix, we can provide them with the kind of customer experience they have come to expect.”
Driving progress securely, protecting data
In addition, Apollo Pharmacy can evolve while protecting data as regulations and the threat landscape evolve. Nutanix solutions ensure compliance with critical regulatory requirements worldwide, including in India. NCP offers built-in data protection and resiliency with secure access to applications. “Nutanix plays an important role in our data defenses while keeping us compliant as per the regulations,” said Balaji.
Optimizing costs of up to 40-50% for more investment
By moving workloads to NCP, Apollo Pharmacy is optimizing costs and freeing up resources to invest in innovation. The move to a hybrid cloud strategy based on NCP is expected to reduce the total cost of ownership by up to 40-50% across the organization. Comments Balaji, “Our move to the hybrid cloud with Nutanix will help us focus more on innovation instead of simply running infrastructure.”
Achieving hybrid cloud flexibility
Apollo Pharmacy will have greater flexibility in running workloads in a hybrid cloud, allowing the company to switch locations based on business needs. NC2's POC already shows what the future could look like. “We’ve seen how using NC2 for disaster recovery gives us an agile and effective way to quickly recover critical workloads across on-premises and cloud environments and we’re excited to see more benefits realized in future,” Balaji said.
Looking ahead, the company plans to trial Nutanix Flow Network Security as part of a micro-segmentation strategy for more granular network traffic control to bolster protection. The Nutanix solution protects critical assets through software-based firewalls to fight off cyber threats.
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11/24