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The Background
Founded in 1947 as Microbiological Associates, BioReliance
is the largest provider of outsourcing services focused on
the rapidly growing biologics sector of the pharmaceutical
industry. BioReliance has provided services to over 600 clients annually, including
most of the largest pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies in
the world.
The Challenge
IIn April of 2007, BioReliance, at the time a business unit of Invitrogen Corporation,
announced that it was being sold – in its entirety - to Avista Capital Partners,
a private equity firm. The sale included its Rockville, Maryland headquarters,
which employs approximately 550 professionals, its 3 sites in the United
Kingdom, employing another 400 staff members, and the firm’s main global
data center located in Frederick, Maryland.
The sale necessitated a quick separation of BioReliance’s networks and active
directories from the Invitrogen network. This meant that the firm needed to
deploy a new server infrastructure as well as perform many other concurrent
upgrades. The complex project also included centralizing the firm’s anti-virus
and Windows update management, acquiring its own WAN and internet
connectivity, and forced BioReliance to build out its data center so that it could
support its new load.
The Solution
Given BioReliance’s short timeframe and small internal IT staff, BioReliance knew it needed help with this multifaceted project. Robert Nield, IT Infrastructurez
Systems Team at BioReliance, and technical lead on the project, began
interviewing potential companies.
During the interview process, Nield stressed the main priorities for BioReliance:
completing the separation within an extremely short timeframe, making the
transition as transparent and low-impact for user community as possible,
maintain free busy scheduling in Outlook, and ensuring an adequate redundancy
of systems.
“Nortec came in with a whole team to explain how they could help us, taking
into account our priorities and restrictions,” Nield says. “And they put together a
comprehensive SOW very quickly. Other companies weren’t as quick, and our
timeframe didn’t allow us to spend months on RFPs.”
Nortec’s recommendation was to migrate all systems at one time. While a somewhat
riskier approach than migrating over several weeks with dual Exchange
infrastructures, BioReliance’s desire to keep the transition low-impact as well as
maintain free busy scheduling in Outlook made this approach the best choice.
Nortec began by meeting with Nield to establish goals, timeline and roll-out
plans. Logistical coordination between the different time zones and geographically
dispersed support staff in the UK were critical. Nortec’s role in the migration
was two-fold: function as project managers for the migration so that BioReliance
staff could work on other related tasks, as well as to implement all of the primary
engineering and architecture.
During the preparation process for the migration, Nield discovered that the
previous company’s desktop management system wasn’t a well-managed environment,
and required Nield to put in a lot of time to manage and upgrade the
workstations. With Nield busy working on this unexpected complication, Nortec
continued implementing the migration plan. “Nortec made it all possible,” says
Nield. “They drove many deadlines to keep us on track.”
The Benefits
Today, BioReliance has a separate, reliable architecture of its own. “Everything
went according to plan and came out exactly as in the initial plan Nortec
proposed,” says Nield. With its new infrastructure in place, BioReliance can
continue in its goal of helping biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies
bring their products to market worldwide.
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