Pfizer Expects to Speed Animal Health Solutions’ Time-to ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Healthcare

Customer Profile

Pfizer Inc., based in New York City, discovers, develops, manufactures, and markets leading prescription medicines for humans and animals and many of the world's best-known consumer brands.

Business Situation

Pfizer Animal Health ran a decentralized application development and hosting environment that increased the time and cost of creating and managing applications.

Solution

NOAH, an integrated application development and hosting environment based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework, helps speed the delivery of health solutions to animals.

Benefits

■ Expected to cut time-to-market by 30 percent

■ IT costs cut 55 percent

■ Servers consolidated by up to two-thirds

■ Application provisioning cut from days to minutes

■ Effective resource planning enabled

| | |“Cutting costs with our Framework-based solution … means more solutions get created, more activity is supported, and productivity is enhanced throughout Pfizer Animal Health.”

James M. Tassell, Architecture Manager, Pfizer Animal Health

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| | | |Pfizer Animal Health wanted to speed the delivery of health solutions for animals. But its |

| | | |decentralized infrastructure, which made application development costly and time-consuming, did not |

| | | |support this goal. So, the division created NOAH (Next-generation Operations and Application |

| | | |Hosting), a centralized application development environment based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework |

| | | |and the Microsoft server product portfolio. NOAH provides reusable subsystems for everything from |

| | | |user authorization to reporting services. With better applications, Pfizer expects to bring new |

| | | |health solutions to customers and their animals 30 percent faster than before, cutting 3 years off |

| | | |the current 10-year average for regulatory approval. Pfizer is benefiting too, saving 55 percent on |

| | | |IT costs over the prior environment. |

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| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

When Pfizer Inc. acquired Pharmacia Corporation in 2003, it created the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, with 2003 sales of U.S.$45 billion. Although Pfizer is known for an array of products that enhance the quality and length of human life, people aren’t the only ones to benefit from the company’s efforts.

One of its three key divisions is Pfizer Animal Health. The division has discovered and developed some of the leading vaccines and prescription medicines that enable pets to live longer and healthier lives, as well. Beyond helping dogs, cats, and horses, Pfizer Animal Health also supports beef, dairy, and pork producers, and their veterinarians, to improve the safety, quality, and productivity of their livestock.

Providing the technology infrastructure to support this industry-leading effort to provide better lives for pets has been a growing challenge, one that became only greater with the Pharmacia acquisition. Pfizer Animal Health had more than 50 home-grown applications in production, hosted in a variety of units within Pfizer. Those applications were developed and hosted in several units affiliated with the company’s primary research and development operation.

As a result, the Animal Health division found itself with four data centers, each with separate Web and database environments, including separate technology support, cost structures, service levels, and management processes. This decentralized software environment made it difficult, if not impossible, for the division to have a clear understanding of its software inventory and future needs. Nor did the decentralization facilitate innovation in software development or hosting to share and reuse resources, consolidate computers, and reduce costs.

With the acquisition, Pfizer embarked on consolidating its own Animal Health technology infrastructure and an integration of that infrastructure with the Animal Health operations of Pharmacia. Pfizer Animal Health offered centralized application development and hosting services, charging internal units a per-application annual fee to recover costs. But that fee was more than some units within the division could justify for their software. As a result, many of the development groups created and ran their applications on separate computers within their units or outsourced their application hosting.

“We had a large and growing number of applications in the Pfizer Animal Health portfolio that we needed to get a better handle on,” says James M. Tassell, Architecture Manager for Pfizer Animal Health. “Also, it was important that we provide faster turnaround time for applications to be delivered to Pfizer units. We knew that as a part of getting new health solutions to our customers more quickly and at lower cost to them, we had to provide improved levels of reuse for common software components, as well as consistency in delivery and standardization in the way we developed business solutions.”

Solution

Pfizer Animal Health considered but rejected an integrated solution based on Java and the BEA J2EE application server. “The skill sets we would have needed to acquire for Java and J2EE would have added a tremendous amount of time and money to the process of building the consolidated environment,” says Tassell. “Given the complexity of Java, we would have added to the continuing time and cost of developing applications for the environment. And many of our internal customers probably would have responded by outsourcing their Java development work—exactly what we didn’t want, because it would limit consistency and reuse.”

Instead, the division selected an integrated solution based on the Microsoft® server product portfolio and the Microsoft .NET Framework, the foundation of the next generation of Windows-based applications, which are easier to build, deploy, and integrate with other networked systems.

That integrated .NET Framework–based solution is called NOAH, for Next-generation Operations and Application Hosting. It’s a flexible, self-service, shared infrastructure that provides a range of resource provisioning and management that Pfizer Animal Health teams need both to create their applications and to run them in production, including a Web platform, database, reporting, and Web services.

“We chose the Microsoft servers and the .NET Framework because our staff was already experienced with the Microsoft Visual Basic® development system, and the .NET Framework provided a natural transition for us,” says Tassell. “More than Java, .NET offered to make it easier for us to reuse components and faster for us to provide.”

The .NET Framework provides class libraries and other reusable components that make it simpler for development teams to create Windows®-based applications. NOAH works in an analogous way. It provides high-level elements—such as a shared infrastructure, an application resource kit (ARK), a configuration management system, metrics, and training and communication tools—that make it easier for Pfizer Animal Health teams to create and manage Pfizer-specific applications.

For example, NOAH includes common naming conventions for directory structures, security groups, database names, database users, and Web site host names. It also includes best practices and capacity planning estimates. Default resource configurations are defined and enforced by the configuration management system.

Because NOAH’s architects planned for every aspect of the application development life cycle, Pfizer Animal Health developers who use NOAH find many tasks are automated for them and automatically comply with relevant Pfizer and government requirements. Also, because application components written by developers using NOAH are standardized, they can be reused easily by other developers using NOAH.

After one year, about 50 Pfizer Animal Health applications have been created on NOAH, covering virtually every aspect of the division’s operations, including research and development, human resources, marketing, finance, and international operations. About half of the division’s 3,000 employees use applications developed and hosted on NOAH, with 1,000 people making daily use of the solution platform.

For example, a custom application for the marketing department uses NOAH resources to enable its teams to track the progress of their projects. The research and development unit uses a NOAH-based application to mix massive quantities of new medications being used in clinical drug trials. And another NOAH-based application tracks the status of products submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for regulatory approval.

Benefits

Thanks to NOAH, Pfizer Animal Health expects to get live-saving drugs and other health solutions into the hands of veterinarians and other customers who need them up to three years faster than currently. Pfizer expects to reduce its IT costs at the same time it helps improve the lives of pets and livestock.

Cuts IT Costs 55 Percent

While Pfizer is using NOAH to improve the lives of animals, it’s also reducing its own total cost of ownership for IT. Pfizer estimates that it is in the process of saving 55 percent over the cost of managing the same volume of applications in its former environment. The savings are a result of having to maintain and replace fewer computer servers, and license less software; being able to manage the entire solution in-house and avoid outsourcing payments; and hire less expensive staff to conduct maintenance.

For example, in the centralized environment, Pfizer is able to reduce the count of computer servers for business functions by two-thirds—decreasing not only hardware and software costs, but also the number of people needed to manage them.

“Cutting costs with our .NET Framework solution doesn’t just mean saving money,” says Tassell. “It means the development environment is now within the reach of some of the smaller units and projects that couldn’t justify the costs we had before. That means more solutions get created, more activity is supported, and productivity is enhanced throughout Pfizer Animal Health. All of these benefits enable us to speed the delivery of health solutions and improve the lives of animals everywhere.”

Faster, Easier Application Creation

Beyond reducing costs of the infrastructure for Pfizer, NOAH means faster and easier application creation for developers throughout the division. Previously, setting up a development environment was an almost completely manual process that required e-mail traffic between the developer and the IT department, and that could take several days. In contrast, 95 percent of all provisioning for application development is handled by developers on a self-serve basis through NOAH, reducing that days-long process to a few minutes

“Faster and easier application development thanks to NOAH is another factor that enhances productivity throughout the division,” says Tassell. “The process isn’t just faster, it’s standardized—and that means that developers don’t have to spend as much time and energy ensuring they meet corporate standards and other requirements. If they’re developing their applications within NOAH, they’re much more likely to meet our standards—and that means that developers can spend more time adding true, strategic value to their software.”

More Accurate, Cost-Effective Planning

Because the creation of development environments takes place within the centralized NOAH environment, Pfizer Animal Health can monitor NOAH’s use through the same reporting services that it makes available to application developers for their applications.

“We now have real, good data on how departments are using the development environment, how they’re using resources,” says Tassell.

That information can be used for accurate charge-backs of NOAH resources, so that each department pays for what it uses—and only for what it uses. Beyond looking backward, reporting on the use of NOAH’s resources enables Tassell and his colleagues to project future infrastructure needs more accurately than ever before. And that means they can do a better job of meeting those needs cost=effectively—ensuring that enough resources are available for growth, without having to maintain excessive levels of computing power, disk space, and other resources.

“Thanks to NOAH, we can predict the capacity we’ll need over the next year and we can plan effectively for that capacity,” says Tassell. “That’s another way to increase effectiveness while reducing costs.”

ARCHITECTURE SYNOPSIS

Pfizer Animal Health’s Next-generation Operations and Application Hosting (NOAH) environment consists of several key components, including NOAH shared resources, enterprise data and integration, content management, and Application Resource Kit (ARK) (see Figure 1).

NOAH Shared Resources

For developers, key self-service resources in NOAH (center left, in diagram) include Web and database resources, reporting tools, and shared services (e.g., security) that enable developers to provision their development resources through NOAH’s automated self-service interface 95 percent of the time. Previously, they needed manual support from IT for all provisioning. These resources are provided through a range of Microsoft and third-party technologies, including Windows Server® 2003 with Internet Information Services 6.0, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Reports.

Shared components that are available to all application developers using NOAH range from event logging to reporting services. Like most of the shared resources in NOAH, event logging is based on component—in this case, the .NET Framework’s application event-logging block—built with the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 development system and Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system. The event-logging component puts an event-logging tab on an application, giving the developer a console for the application showing all resources, available changes, and an event log of implemented changes, errors, and successes for that application.

Another NOAH resource, SQL Server Reporting Services, is available to developers that want to include reporting functionality in their Web-based applications. Thirty-one NOAH applications use it to enable people to create reports quickly, and reduce the time needed to display data. NOAH’s own ARK uses SQL Server Reporting Services to generate its application inventory reports, change logs, and utilities reports. A marketing portal created in NOAH uses Reporting Services to track rebates. Another application uses it to report on the status of Pfizer products moving through the federal regulatory process.

Enterprise Data and Integration

Enterprise data and integration (ED&I) is Pfizer’s term for a set of enterprise services, not to be confused with the Electronic Data Interchange. The ED&I portion of NOAH (center, in diagram) enables developers to take advantage of NOAH resources and prebuilt components for code reuse in their own applications. The ED&I component includes the Animal Health data catalog, which developers can use to find and subscribe to data they need for their applications. The subscriptions are implemented using extract-transform-load (ETL), enterprise information integration (EII), and enterprise application integration (EAI) functionality. Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) helps transform some of this data, and Pfizer Animal Health is evaluating the use of Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 for its EAI functionality.

Content Management System

Structured data such as product pricing is contained in the Animal Health data catalog. Unstructured data, however, such as marketing images and video, is managed by the content management system (center right, in diagram), which provides document management, search, taxonomy, and other functionality. Pfizer Animal Health is evaluating Microsoft SharePoint® Portal Server for its content management system; the solution already uses SharePoint Portal Server for the developer portal, ARK.

Windows SharePoint Services enables Pfizer to provide a framework for delivering dashboard sites and the indexing and meta-tagging of unstructured data. For example, using Windows SharePoint Services and enterprise data and integration, Pfizer Animal Health developers have created a financial data dashboard that displays a global map in a Web part. An executive can click on the map to navigate to various regions and get sales figures, financial targets, and other data.

Previously, this data was only contained in isolated spreadsheets, requiring executives to search through the data to obtain comparisons. To bring this solution to its laptop users while they’re on the road, Pfizer is now looking at the use of smart clients. This Microsoft approach to clients combines the rich user interface of traditional client applications with the broad reach and easy deployment of thin clients.

Application Resource Kit

ARK is the developer portal to the configuration management system (center top, in diagram). It enables developers to provision and manage the application-specific resources available through NOAH. Through ARK, developers can access the inventory of applications and their dependent resources, the configuration change log for the application and each of its resources, identify application owners and developers, and perform change communications to those owners and developers. ARK also provides access to the documentation and training materials needed to use the solution. As mentioned, ARK is built on SharePoint Portal Server. It uses Web parts to move data between ARK and the underlying configuration management system.

Technical Challenges

Creating NOAH required its developers to overcome a variety of technical challenges, including the creation of a security framework that application developers could use to create applications meeting Pfizer security standards, and the creation of a configuration management system to manage the large number of servers in the NOAH environment.

Security Framework

Pfizer Animal Health’s prior environment included a variety of security mechanisms for custom-built applications. That caused several problems. None of the mechanisms had been built to meet emerging corporate standards, which meant there was no guarantee they would provide the level and extent of protection that Pfizer wanted for its new NOAH-based applications. For example, if appropriate user authentication services were not available, developers had to create them anew for each application.

Pfizer created a security framework based on a .NET assembly to expose the application programming interface (API) to NOAH applications. Like most of the shared resources in NOAH, the assembly is built with Visual Basic .NET and Visual Studio .NET 2003. An Installer component installs the API on developer workstations to facilitate their use of the security framework.

The security framework authenticates against user, group, role, and application security information stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database. In addition, an Application Administrator component allows developers to manage the application security model, and a custom-written Group and Role Manager allows developers to manage groups and assign them to roles.

With the security framework, Pfizer has the common approach to application security that it wanted, including a common way to delegate group and role management, audit application security changes, and provide simple APIs to program special application security needs. The framework provides several types of abstraction, all of which allow any part of the system to be upgraded or changed without affecting the rest—in contrast to earlier approaches, in which a change to the security model would require rewriting code for all applications that depended on it. For example, the security framework abstracts security authority from the application security configuration, and abstracts application code from the authentication mechanism and the security groups and roles.

Managing Consistent Server Configurations

With NOAH running on multiple servers, Pfizer Animal Health had a challenge in managing the software configurations on all of the machines. Moreover, the company had to maintain consistency across the servers throughout the life cycle environment (i.e., development, test, and production) with limited support personnel. Finally, servers had to be managed according to their specific role in the solution (e.g., Web server, database server, or reporting server).

To address these challenges, Pfizer developed a configuration management system (CMS), a suite of automated tools that it uses to maintain application configuration and component states across servers in the NOAH environment.

The CMS has several key components. Pfizer created dynamic Web forms based on Microsoft technology, to collect information from users. SQL Server 2000 provides the database to store the software configuration information. Pfizer created the CMS engine using COM+ components, with XML providing internal communication between components. Automation providers were written for Windows Script Host method, .NET assembly methods, and COM methods.

With the CMS, Pfizer can automate complex system changes and enable the rapid development of self-service tools. The automation components are reusable, so they are available to expedite additional development to meet future needs. The CMS tracks system changes automatically and initiates change communications between components. Because of the high degree of automation—95 percent of formerly manual processes are now automatic—the number of highly skilled support staff needed to manage configuration issues is reduced. And the system provides the data that Pfizer needs to perform change impact analysis and reporting.

Microsoft .NET

Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.

.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.

For more information about Microsoft .NET and Web services, please visit these Web sites:



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| |Software

■ Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

− Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition

■ Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

■ Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

|Technologies

− Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1

− Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0

− Microsoft Message Queue

− Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

− Windows SharePoint Services | |

“Faster and easier application development thanks to NOAH is another factor that enhances productivity throughout the division.”

James M. Tassell, Architecture Manager, Pfizer Animal Health

| |

© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published October 2006. | | |

For More Information

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For more information about Pfizer Animal Health products and services, visit the Web site at:



[pic]

Figure 1. NOAH consists of a shared infrastructure, an application resource kit, a configuration management system, metrics, and training and communication tools.

“The process isn’t just faster, it’s standardized—and that means that developers don’t have to spend as much time and energy ensuring they meet corporate standards and other requirements.”

James M. Tassell, Architecture Manager, Pfizer Animal Health

| |

“Thanks to NOAH, we can predict the capacity we’ll need over the next year and we can plan effectively for that capacity. That’s another way to increase effectiveness while reducing costs.”

James M. Tassell, Architecture Manager, Pfizer Animal Health

| |

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