‘‘Companies are able to benefit without the need to make a significant investment’’

Since its launch in mid-2011, Office 365 is one of Microsoft’s fastest growing businesses globally. Ram Kumar Pichai, General Manager – Microsoft Office Division talks about the service, its USP and its importance in the pharma industry

Explain the advantages of Microsoft 365 and its uses in the pharma sector?

Ram Kumar Pichai

Office 365 is an enterprise class software that has exchange for mail, SharePoint for collaboration and document management, Lync for instant messaging and PC to PC calling coupled with Office applications. This entire portfolio is available on cloud as a service so that customers of any size, from SOHO to large enterprises, can avail it. For health organisations of all sizes, Office 365 can help transform complex, time consuming operations into efficient, collaborative, information-driven processes in the cloud.

Connect the healthcare ecosystem: With the rich collaboration capabilities of Lync online and SharePoint online, stakeholders throughout the continuum of care can share sensitive data securely using the organisation’s existing unified communications tools. With exchange online, users can access and manage work schedules, email messages, contacts, and calendars on nearly any device. Powerful web-based tools simplify online deployments for the IT department. Microsoft runs Office 365 on a global network of data centres, with guaranteed 99.9 per cent uptime, geo-redundancy, and built-in disaster recovery to help provide the robust security and reliability that your data requires.

Address compliance requirements: Microsoft products and services, alongwith the Microsoft security development lifecycle (SDL), can help organisations address compliance requirements. Microsoft Office 365 supports the following where applicable and/or possible:

• International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 27001
• EU Safe Harbor
• EU Model Clauses
• Data Processing Agreement

Reduce operational costs and complexity: In today’s budget-conscious climate, streamlined IT operations in the cloud gives you more time to focus on improving the quality of medical services. For care providers, Microsoft and partner solutions help connect disparate systems, processes, and data sources with a single user interface for accessing multiple clinical and informational systems. Automating daily functions and extending work-flows help to minimise human error, as well as keep information moving, supporting timely decision-making and action.

In the recent past, it has been seen that pharma companies are focussing more on spending and hiring medical representatives. How will your service give an extra mileage to the pharma companies in this regard?

Microsoft Windows 8 can provide the devices and experiences users love, while delivering enterprise-grade solutions. Microsoft Flexible Workstyle offerings help extend security-enhanced, controlled access to information and applications from virtually anywhere while simplifying application and resource management.

Empower users and increase productivity

• Allow virtually anywhere connectivity: Provide health professionals, patients and medical representatives with security-enhanced, hassle-free access to the data, applications, people, and social networking tools that they need to provide and access care virtually anywhere, any time, and on a variety of devices.
• Provide a personalised experience: Improve productivity by providing healthcare professionals, patients and medical representatives with personalised experiences that anticipate their needs, remember their preferences, and adapt to their unique work styles so that they can deliver quality care where and when it is needed.

Address the needs of your ICT department

• Enhance security and control: With centralised desktop and mobile device management—and a common identity infrastructure—it can help mitigate security and privacy risks by consistently enforcing compliance with industry regulations and organisational policies.
• Simplify application and resource management: A single view across environments, desktops, and devices—and across the applications and services deployed on them—can enable you to more pro-actively and efficiently secure, plan, deploy, and manage your entire ICT infrastructure. Common, familiar tools to deploy, configure, monitor, and report across different environments simplify the management of a complex system and help you keep it up to date.

What special features does Microsoft 365 provide to pharma companies?

The three key features that Microsoft Office 365 provides the pharma companies are: addressing compliance requirements, reducing operational costs and complexity as well as connecting to the healthcare ecosystem.

How will these features help pharma companies to cut cost and add more margin to the firms’ top line and bottom line?

Accessing productivity solutions in the cloud is a win-win situation for any pharma company. Firstly, they are able to take advantage of industry leading IT tools which can make a tangible difference to individual and collective performance and boost the bottom line. And secondly, they can be sourced with very little upfront investment in infrastructure, helping to preserve vital IT budgets. With Office 365, the software is supported by a Microsoft data centre, alleviating the pressure on firms to invest large sums in on-premise hardware. As well as reducing capital expenditure, it also means companies can reduce their management bills, and free up IT workers to focus on other areas where value can be added.

The use of hosted productivity solutions also has security benefits, in the sense that the product vendor assumes responsibility for servers and other critical hardware. Benefitting from economies of scale, the provider is able to invest more on security than individual companies would be able to do alone. This means companies are able to benefit from unprecedented levels of security, without the need to make a significant investment out of their own budget.

For example, Lupin, one of the fastest growing pharma companies globally, recently deployed Microsoft Office 365 to simplify employee communication, gain business insights and share experiences across its offices in four continents. By moving to Office 365, Lupin reduced costs in a number of ways including personnel, hardware, facilities, and deployment expenses. From initial project ROI estimates, this could work out to as much as 40 per cent over a three year time period.

Presently, how many pharma companies have already implemented this into their system and what type of responses have you received from them?

Since its launch in mid-2011, Office 365 is one of Microsoft’s fastest growing businesses globally. After only 18 months, one in five of Microsoft’s enterprise customers worldwide use the paid service, up from one in seven a year ago. The number of small and medium-sized businesses using Office 365 around the world has also grown by over 150 per cent in the last 12 months.

How many products have you introduced for the Indian pharma sector and what are the responses so far?

Indian customers are adopting Office 365 four times faster than its predecessor BPOS. Clearly there is a strong appetite in the market across all sectors, including the pharma sector, to get powerful productivity and collaboration tools.

What are your future plans for the Indian market?

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of the next-generation Office 365 for businesses in India. Office 365 works across multiple devices, is social and integrates seamlessly with the cloud. It unlocks newer productivity scenarios and provides organisations with the desired IT control and management. Simultaneously, Microsoft also made available business SKUs of Office 2013 for on premise users. It also includes updated Microsoft Lync Online, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and the all new Yammer. Office 365 can be installed on up to five devices for a single user under the Office 365 licensing.

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