Pfizer Inc. discovers, develops, manufactures and markets prescription medicines for humans and animals, as well as many of the world’s best-known consumer brands. Pfizer is one of the largest foreign pharmaceutical enterprises in China. Since its entry into China in the early 1980s, Pfizer has successfully established three state-of-the-art plants in Dalian, Suzhou and Wuxi, and one global R&D center in Shanghai. Pfizer has launched more than 50 innovative products in China and plans to launch 20 more in the next five years. Pfizer’s Business Technology (BT) department has 20 staff working in the manufacturing centers, R&D center and different divisions across China.

The Challenge: Reducing IT Costs and Improving Application Performance

To support its China operations, Pfizer delivers a wide range of enterprise applications (SunSystems financial management application, supply chain management, etc.) and customer-facing applications (sales force automation, sales data collection system, etc.). The company previously implemented multiple servers running the client/server SunSystems application across China. To bring down the cost of updating and maintaining hardware, the BT department was planning to consolidate the distributed servers into one box, located in Beijing.

Additionally, most of the company’s customer-facing applications are Web-based. The sales staff, who are dispersed across different cities, are required to update sales data and complete reports online every day; however, due to the slow application response caused by limited IT infrastructure, especially in second-tier cities, it often took two hours to finish a report, resulting in tremendous productivity loss. The BT department wanted to find a complete solution to address these problems.

Implementing a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution

After comparing several options, Pfizer’s BT department selected a Citrix solution to support server consolidation because it is able to provide Pfizer a single, secure point of application access and a consistent user experience. Before rolling out the Citrix solution, Pfizer built a proof-of-concept project to examine how well the proposed solution would meet the business needs of the company. After a pilot deployment for six weeks with 100 users, the team was happy with the results. Working with Stone, a Citrix® China Distribution Partner, Pfizer implemented Citrix Presentation Server™ and Citrix Access Gateway™ with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003. The company purchased licenses for 100 concurrent users.

Pfizer has installed its SunSystems application and its sales data collection system on a single Citrix Presentation Server located in the Beijing office. Currently, about 700 staff members from the finance and sales departments across China access these applications via Citrix Presentation Server. All the office-based users connect via a Frame Relay WAN, and remote users –- mainly sales staff scattered across the country –- log into the Pfizer network via a broadband connection. SunSystems and Internet Explorer (the Web browser interface for the sales data collection system) are accessed remotely via Citrix Access Gateway by all field users.

To ensure the security of remote access, Pfizer relies on its Citrix environment. With the Advanced Access Control option of Access Gateway, the BT team finely controls both what enterprise resource can be accessed and what actions can be performed, reducing the cost and complexity of providing secure remote access. Seamless integration of Access Gateway and Presentation Server supports any application in its native form with no changes, and can traverse the firewall and hide the IP addresses of the remote network to inhibit the traversal of worms.

Reduced Maintenance Cost and Enhanced Work Efficiency

After nearly one year, the benefits of the Citrix solution are apparent. Thanks to the centralized Citrix architecture, Pfizer was able to consolidate the multiple servers running SunSystems into one Citrix server in the Beijing office. The company saves 10 man days per year that were previously required to maintain the local server hardware. All users can remotely access SunSystems via the Citrix platform from Shanghai, Dalian and Suzhou with high performance and availability.

Citrix Presentation Server allows Pfizer sales and finance staff to access and view documents from remote locations without the need to download them onto their notebook PCs. Since only screen updates, mouse clicks and keystrokes are transmitted between client and server, considerable time is saved compared to downloading the full document. Previously it took four hours to generate some of the finance reports, where today the time has been reduced to 35-45 minutes, thanks to faster access performance with Citrix.

“By better utilizing available bandwidth, the Citrix solution has improved the performance of the Web-based applications by 40 percent,” said Sirsij Peshin, BT Director at Pfizer. “Released from time-consuming data entry tasks, sales staff can focus more on understanding and serving customer needs. The value the Citrix solution provides is not only in cost savings and improved productivity, but also a better overall user experience.”

Future Plans

Pfizer plans to maximize the value of its Citrix solution by expanding the number of enterprise applications that are delivered using Citrix Presentation Server and Citrix Access Gateway. During 2006, more enterprise applications, including supply chain management solutions from Manugistics and Logility, will be delivered via the Citrix servers. In addition, by leveraging Citrix Access Gateway, Pfizer’s BT department is now looking to move all new applications for remote users to the Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure.

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