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It’s simple science – hermit crabs outgrow their shells. Humans outgrow clothing and shoes. Businesses outgrow their processes – particularly at the rate at which technology is advancing. EyePoint Pharmaceuticals* is no stranger to growth or science. As the pharmaceutical manufacturing company grew, so did their team. Headquartered in Watertown, MA, EyePoint develops tiny, sustained-release drug delivery products designed to deliver drugs at a controlled and steady rate for months or years. They have developed three of the four products approved by the US or EU for the long-term, sustained-release delivery of drugs to treat chronic eye disease.
“We’re changing from a development company into a commercial company, so we need to be current with our IT infrastructure,” said Marty Nazzaro, Senior Vice President of Operations at EyePoint. EyePoint recently completed phase 1 of its migration to Microsoft’s Office 365 with the assistance of its IT consulting partner, iCorps Technologies. Marty shares how the platform's functionality will help the company keep pace with its transformation.
With new leadership focused on taking EyePoint’s developments into the market, Marty anticipates the company to grow again. That type of advancement involves hiring additional resources in sales and marketing and implementing new processes, such as tracking shipments. Thus, the company’s ERP system had to be upgraded, and the IT infrastructure needed to support it effectively.
EyePoint's in-house Exchange server and Office tools were also due for upgrades. Marty comments that “it just made sense” to implement Office 365. The cloud-based platform includes secure email, familiar Office applications (i.e., Word, Excel, PowerPoint), and other productivity tools, including Skype for Business, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online hosted email for business, Yammer, and OneNote. Office 365 allows the company to scale to meet business needs and provides employees with the flexibility to work from different devices and remote locations and collaborate in real time with each other.
“Once we start receiving customer orders, we want to make sure we have a platform that is scalable and cutting edge,” Marty said. “We’re really starting to take a much bigger focus on the IT environment, social media, website, and everything else that comes along with that.”
With more employees, locations, and more work, in general, comes more laptops, mobile phones, and the need to be productive from anywhere while keeping company data secure.
“The security — especially laptop and smartphone security — becomes much more important,” Marty said. “We are going to have a much bigger volume of people out there trying to push our products.”
Ensuring that employees are protected from exposing critical information (even if by accident) is necessary for the company to remain compliant and avoid potential risks. As a publicly traded company, EyePoint must comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), which requires that security safeguards are in place to prevent and detect security breaches. Office 365 streamlines this control by allowing EyePoint’s IT team to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information with data-loss prevention controls in mobile application management. The iCorps team will also be helping EyePoint implement Sharepoint online, a secure cloud-based document management and storage system part of the Office 365 services stack. Sharepoint with digital rights management allows businesses to protect their documents by specifying who has permission for actions such as viewing, printing, saving, or copying. When the business needs change, and someone leaves the company or moves departments, for example, that employee's access can be changed or revoked.
“Zero problems came to me,” said Marty. “I didn’t have to deal with it at all. It went really well.” He was relieved that EyePoint would not have to undertake a major system upgrade for quite some time because of Office 365’s scalability and multi-faceted functionality.
The iCorps consulting team will also train EyePoint employees on Skype for Business. EyePoint plans to expand its presence in the European market, and Marty’s vision is that video conferencing will become the standard for business meetings abroad. “It’s much easier and more cost-effective to use the Skype format than for us to fly out and talk face-to-face with them,” he said.
iCorps has been a strategic partner of Eyepoints for several years. So, for Marty, entrusting the cloud migration to his iCorps consulting team was never a question. iCorps Technologies applies its unique business approach to customized technology solutions that support Eyepoint’s business and help the company attain efficiency, productivity, and agility.
“I’m a manufacturing guy…to have people like that who handle IT, and I don’t have to deal with it is why we have iCorps,” Marty said. “This is why EyePoint is happy with them.”
*Formerly pSivida
