Cebu pharmacy chain picks IBM solution

ThreeSixty Pharmacy announced it has selected IBM Storwize V7000 Unified Disk System and the IBM Tivoli Storage Flash Copy Manager to streamline its operations to support its expansion plan.

Photo shows (L-R): IBM Philippines country manager for general business Chestnut Andaya (4th fr L) shakes hand with ThreeSixty Pharmacy president Antonio Yap (5th fr L) during a media luncheon on 360 Pharmacy's 2nd anniversary and partnership with IBM

ThreeSixty Pharmacy is a retail pharmacy company based in Cebu City that offers branded and generic medicines. The company operates around 60 retail branches located within the Visayas region, with plans to open more than 360 branches regionally within the next nine years.

Prior to implementing the solution, ThreeSixty Pharmacy lacked capacity to store the increasing amount of database information it was collecting and its existing infrastructure did not meet best practices or provide scalability.

Smart use of technology will enable the successful execution of our aggressive expansion plans. We were looking for market proven solutions and selected IBM based on their global expertise in providing intuitive technology solutions, said Antonio Yap, president, ThreeSixty Pharmacy. This solution enables us to address our operating and IT challenges and allowed us to respond rapidly to business and market changes.

As part of its geographic expansion initiatives, IBM is actively expanding its business operations in the Philippines and other Asean countries where storage is emerging as one of the sectors driving IT growth in fast-growing economies across the region. In the Philippines, IBM is already working with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) to establish the first Philippine Systems & Technology R&D Laboratory to help spur economic growth in the country.

To achieve and support rapid business growth, there is a need for effective tools to manage the increasing data requirements faced by large and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The old ways of buying and managing storage have also become less effective. We are pleased that ThreeSixty Pharmacy has chosen IBM to optimize and simplify their infrastructure, in line with their ongoing expansion plans, said Chestnut Andaya, country manager for general business at IBM Philippines.

ThreeSixty Pharmacy engaged IBM Business Partners MSI-ECS Philippines and Cebu A.I. Logic, Inc. to implement the IBM solution.

For maintenance and support of its new storage infrastructure system, the company also signed a three-year, 247 contract with IBM Global Technology Services.

The project started in February 2012 and was successfully implemented in March 2012.

Read this article:
Cebu pharmacy chain picks IBM solution