BANGALORE, India, May 20, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Mankind Pharma, a leading pharmaceutical company in India, has selected SoftLayer's cloud platform to support its business growth and expansion. SoftLayer, an IBM company, will enable Mankind Pharma to significantly improve the performance of its business critical applications and scale the use of these applications across multiple locations.

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Founded in 1995, Mankind Pharma has grown rapidly in the last decade and is currently among the top five fastest growing pharmaceutical companies in India with an employee base of over 9,000, a turnover of INR 2800 crores and 15 manufacturing plants. Mankind Pharma is a fully integrated pharmaceutical company, with a comprehensive network of 60 C&F (Carrying & Forwarding) agents and over 6,000 stockiest.

Given the exponential growth, Mankind Pharma wanted to align its IT infrastructure with the business goals of the company, while keeping operations and capital expenditures to a minimum. The company also wanted an IT infrastructure to scale based on the seasonal peaks and troughs of the pharmaceutical business.

SoftLayer's infrastructure was chosen as the ideal solution to fit the business needs of Mankind Pharma. It ensured scalability of the infrastructure depending on Mankind Pharma's changing business needs. Since these applications are designed to meet the growing needs of its key stakeholders, it becomes mission-critical for Mankind Pharma to deploy the right amount of compute to run seamless operations. SoftLayer's cloud provided the perfect combination of pay-as-you-use option as well as scalability to suit business need.

"We chose SoftLayer as a service which helped us deploy our business critical application on Cloud which required a highly scalable infrastructure to meet the ongoing demands of the market. SoftLayer is geared to meet these requirements and help us continue our strong business momentum and provide greater client satisfaction," said Pramod Gokhale, Vice President-Information Services & Strategy, Mankind Pharma.

Apart from scaling operations during peak months, the SoftLayer infrastructure will also help Mankind Pharma scale up quickly when it expands operations to international markets.

"IBM has been a strategic partner of Mankind Pharma for a long time and it is exciting to see our engagement is expanding on to cloud. With SoftLayer, IBM is focused on providing higher value and delivering unmatched expertise and capabilities to help clients tackle business specific challenges with cloud. With SoftLayer cloud, Mankind Pharma can have a better control on their operations to drive business growth," said Ganesh Margabandhu, General Manager, Global Technology Services, IBM India South Asia.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, IBM SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About Mankind Pharma
For more information, please visit: http://www.mankindpharma.com

Media Contact
Anushri Dubey
IBM Communications
+91 8095626117
anusdube@in.ibm.com

Nicholas Smith
IBM Communications
212 671 9653
nssmith@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM

SOURCE: IBM