Company Profile: Medicis
Industry: Pharmaceutical
Medicis is a leading independent specialty pharmaceutical company based in Scottsdale, Arizona that focuses primarily on the treatment of dermatological and podiatric conditions and aesthetics medicine. More specifically, the Company sells a wide range of products that treat everything from acne and fungal infections to psoriasis and dermatitis. Founded in 1988, Medicis is a NYSE company with over 600 employees and $517MM (2008) in revenue that boasts a five year compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21 percent.
If “a picture is worth a thousand words,” Medicis is a portrait. At any one time, Medicis fields 300 pharmaceutical sales representatives that require significant mobile 3G laptop and Smartphone access to Company information. In addition, Medicis maintains four and a half sites across North America, the ½ being a co-location data center located on the Eastern Seaboard. Medicis maintains between 100 and 130 highly-virtualized servers (part of its green initiative to be carbon neutral), an additional 24 to 26 hosting servers and 40 terabytes of storage space spread out between all of its networked locations. Add to this masterpiece broad brushstrokes of complex voice and data requirements governed by a highly-regulated and compliance-driven industry makes for a very interesting and unique IT environment.
Medicis has a relatively small, but highly-skilled team of IT professionals led by Ralph Loura, senior vice president of information technology and Jon Fendenheim, senior manager of infrastructure services. Working side by side with these two gentlemen is their Custom Storage consultant. According to Loura, “The Company previously had been working with Custom Storage on a number of IT-related initiatives. However, when we [IT] came to realize that we needed to better support our Company’s strategic business objectives from an IT perspective, we quickly began to realize the full scope of Custom Storage’s capabilities. The Company had made the decision to move into a new, more accommodating building. We took this move as an opportunity to increase performance by incorporating a new IT architecture that addressed the need for additional storage capacity, system redundancy and security, while simultaneously achieving higher availability, additional flexibility and increased scalability on a system-wide basis.”
He called Custom Storage and told them what he wanted to accomplish. The Custom Storage team immediately mobilized and began the planning phase with us from a requirements, compliance and regulatory standpoint,” said Fendenheim. “Custom Storage not only helped us plan, but also implemented, migrated and tested our overall system architecture to include our wired and wireless data and voice connectivity, call management systems, data storage systems and automated backup and recovery systems. In addition, Custom Storage helped us with our move from PSTN to VoIP. It is less about the up sale, and more about quality of service, since Custom Storage is product and system agnostic.”
“Working with Custom Storage allowed us to successfully accomplish all of our IT goals by designing and implementing a best-in-class architecture that will serve the Company well into the future,” said Loura.
What keeps Loura up at night? “It is the sheer volume and rate of change that occurs within IT and within our industry. I always want to know where we are on the change curve, on top, behind or in front. Second, I want to ensure that all of the procedural documents are being kept current. If we make a change, it has to be properly documented and distributed from a procedural standpoint. Third, I want to be able to manage expectations. Within our own IT organization, we maintain a relatively high bar when it comes to performance. However, every time we take on an initiative, we end up surpassing that bar, which now, the rest of the Company has come to expect.”
