Vodafone Business Services (VBS), the enterprise arm of the Vodafone India is now looking at the pharmaceutical industry as a total communication provider to the sector. Currently, the pharma industry contributes around four to five per cent to the total revenue of Vodafone Business Services. The names of the pharma companies were withheld as part of the company’s policy.

VBS made a strong foray into wireline services with a suite of offering targets 20 per cent of the revenues from this business. “We partner pharmaceutical industry as their total communication solution provider and cater to both wireline and wireless requirements. A medium to large pharma company typically has multiple offices, factories, depots, etc. for which it needs advanced inter office connectivity. Besides, it also has a large mobile field force which needs to be connected to their systems to track leads, doctor visits. In fact, Wireline services are like a lifeline for the pharma sector,  Naveen Chopra, director, Vodafone Business Services told Pharmabiz in an email interaction.

“In the wireline space, we offer Private Leased Circuits (national and international), MPLS-based Virtual Private Network (VPN), Internet Leased Lines, Office Wireline Voice, Toll Free Services, Audio and Video Conferencing Services, etc. We also mobilize their centrally hosted applications for their mobile workforce to access and provide real time updates, increasing productivity,” he added.

The total communication solution provided by VBS includes wireline, wireless, mobility and M2M (Machine-to-machine) solution. It is supported by a robust network infrastructure, comprising 1,20,000 km of fibre backbone, over 350 points of presence  across 130 cities and a Network Operations Centre (NOC) for 24x7 performance management. This network provides an enterprise with high-speed and secure links between its multiple offices spread across India and overseas, enabling it to respond rapidly to its customers in the fast evolving paradigm of digital communication.

The wireline space is being looked as an important component in the wake of digital communication’s  rapidly evolving digital commerce. Responsiveness to customers and  customer centricity in the evolving paradigm requires processing of large quantity of data swiftly and reliably. So it is critical for the pharma industry to adopt total communication solutions like voice and data, wireless and wire-line to help them harness the power of unified communication, he said.

The investment to be made by pharma industry depends on the size and presence of the enterprise. Large companies will have centralized applications hosted in a data centre. Such organisations require all their offices connected to each other besides their central infrastructure to access data and software. This necessitates a state of the art, secure VPN solution. Besides this, internet connectivity and wireline voice are pre-requisites for any business, said the VBS director.

Lifesciences’ Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) is highly receptive to wireline services as the sector requires processing of large quantity of data swiftly and reliably. These organisations work on the basis of a central repository of data. Wireline services are essential to harness the power of unified communications made possible through Internet, IP Voice solutions and inter office connectivity solutions. Such business Process Outsourcing (BPO) organisations also need to connect to the clients’ data centre through secure connectivity to access the database, customer relation management (CRM) software, among others, informed Chopra.