Why the pharmproizvoditel of Biocad refused to use HP solutions, Dell, SAP and other known IT brands

The Biocad company refused use of the western hardware, including Dell and HP, and aims to use as much as possible in the IT infrastructure software of the Russian development and with the open code. It follows from a speech of the vice president for IT and operational development of Biocad Evgeny Pochkayev at a conference of TAdviser "Import substitution: real experience" in February, 2017.

In the summer of 2016 of Biocad started own DPC with a computing cluster overall performance 1.1 Pflops. It is necessary, first of all, for acceleration of work on creation of new medicines. In a cluster, according to TAdviser, servers of the Asian producer are used. Earlier reported to Biocad that in it computing systems based on the graphic processors NVidia Tesla are used. The DPC is vendoronezavisimy: in it it is possible to use different "iron".

Earlier the company used leased servers of Dell and HP, they were located on the third-party platform, Evgeny Pochkayev told TAdviser.

Evgeny Pochkayev told how the company constructed effective IT infrastructure with the minimum use of the western solutions

In Asia the company buys also some other equipment, for example, robots for production who are not manufactured in Russia. At the same time Biocad imports the equipment: for this purpose it has a purchasing office in China.

In the company software solutions of own development and domestic manufacturers are widely used. In staff of Biocad there are bioinformation sciences which write algorithms for applied calculations on a cluster, Evgeny Pochkayev told TAdviser.

From everything the application software used in the company about 50% are the share of the solutions developed "from scratch" by own forces or with involvement of the Russian outsourcers. Among them, for example, a management system for quality control, software for clinical trials, the laboratory systems. As ERP in Biocad 1C is used, at the same time the company is going to replace some blocks with software of own development.

The open source software is occupied in Biocad by about 25% and about 5% there are platform solutions based on the known platforms of the Russian producers. Only 5% of the used applied software are the share of solutions of the western vendors. They are applied, for example, as a part of the difficult equipment. With the system software in terms of import substitution a situation more difficult, Evgeny Pochkayev notes.

According to Evgeny Pochkayev, around the western solutions there was a number of myths. Among them – existence of industry solutions (best practices) as panaceas for all companies and also the myth that the western products are the best. According to him, in the company representatives of SAP regularly call and propose industry solutions. Pochkayev does not consider SAP best practices: these solutions, for example, can be relevant at an exit to the IPO, he adds.

The Russian solutions cost much cheaper and at the same time can not be of a lower quality western and than performance, and at the same time allow to receive self-written solutions the maximum flexibility of setup. For example, Biocad wrote a quality control system for itself that was many times cheaper the western solutions and provided high flexibility – analysts of the company can change the necessary processes.