Drupal, Acquia Cloud Platform, Acquia TAM, Acquia Site Factory, Acquia Site Studio, Acquia CLI
Indegene is a leading digital-first life sciences commercialization company supporting biopharmaceutical, emerging biotech, and medical device firms throughout their product development and market introduction phases. Leveraging over two decades of healthcare domain expertise, state-of-the-art technology, and an agile operating model, it offers a comprehensive suite of solutions. The company’s approach is designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of its clients' go-to-market strategies, ensuring they are equipped to meet the modern demands of the industry.
With a global workforce exceeding 5,000 employees, Indegene has become a trusted partner in the healthcare industry's ongoing transformation, harnessing technology, digital advancements, and reimagined operating models. The company’s clientele includes industry giants such as Woodward Pharma, Pfizer, AMGEN, Boehringer Ingelheim, Mundi Pharma, and Johnson and Johnson.
For 25 years, Indegene has been a trusted partner to the healthcare industry, enabling its healthcare clients to be future-ready. The company and the pharmaceutical market have both grown and evolved over time — and with the rise in direct-to-consumer advertising, new treatments have been increasingly making headlines in the media, causing them to become household names seemingly overnight.
To better serve its pharmaceutical clients, Indegene knew it needed to more deeply integrate with its partners to provide a top-tier service, improving application and development efficiency.
Indegene faced numerous challenges. Its existing infrastructure wasn’t easily scalable, and stack usage inefficiencies led to wasted time and money. Additionally, Indegene found that for itself and its clients, page views and traffic regularly exceeded its provider’s limits, leading to costly overages. Application performance and caching issues led to problems with page load times. Meanwhile, bandwidth and network-related issues negatively impacted server response time.
Additionally, the company suffered production deployment and post-production issues; for example, in post-production, developers couldn’t access data logs to pinpoint and troubleshoot critical issues. And campaign URLs stripped query parameters, causing issues with non-standard HTTPS redirects.
Indegene had many Drupal experts on its team. But when one of Indegene’s clients shared that they were going launch a marketing campaign during the Super Bowl — directing a massive, unprecedented amount of traffic to their website — Indegene’s development team realized that it needed an inside person at Acquia, capable of providing insights into Acquia’s hosting environments’ architecture and pinpointing opportunities for improvements.
To effectively address its challenges, Indegene focused on establishing a modern web application infrastructure that included development, staging, production environment, CI/CD, and monitoring — reducing the risk of security and compliance incidents in the process.
Indegene added Acquia Technical Account Management (TAM) to its subscription, and a Drupal and Acquia expert provided the company with strategic guidance to effectively address its technical needs. The Acquia TAM took the lead in reviewing the company’s overall ecosystem, paying particular attention to issues related to cloud platform scalability and security impact. Acquia’s TAM provided guidance that helped resolve website traffic and performance issues, optimizing the website and its caching capabilities and easing the migration between Drupal versions.
Additionally, the Acquia TAM set up a weekly recurring call that allows Indegene to quickly and effectively address complex support issues. They also provided infrastructure and security monitoring and high-traffic event support, reducing website network failure and outages. Now, TAM assistance means Indegene’s development team can more effectively troubleshoot critical issues, and the TAM assists with any deployment complexities or issues.
The TAM, with the support of the entire Acquia organization, ensured that the client’s Super Bowl campaign went off without a hitch, providing Indegene with application efficiency and optimization advice, as well as offering guidance on the best way to upscale its infrastructure to help its client deal with the expected traffic. Acquia TAM continues to be critical to Indegene’s success by monitoring the infrastructure, providing valuable strategic guidance, and troubleshooting Drupal and Acquia products to rapidly maximize Indegene’s value to its customers.
“The TAM team did a great job of offering a feasible solution to fix our key pain points, allowing us to run the platform efficiently and effectively both at the application and server level,” said Mohammed Ismail, senior development engineer at Indegene.
Through the guidance of Acquia TAM, Indegene improved its application efficiency to the point that its code runs at a top-tier level on Acquia Site Factory, providing a quality hosted Drupal experience for its clients. Indegene’s high Varnish cache rate and low PHP memory utilization rate demonstrate the company’s code efficiency, which is a catalyst for its impressive performance results.
Thanks to Acquia TAM, Indegene’s infrastructure was able to handle its client’s Super Bowl campaign without issue, receiving roughly 5 million hits in just a few hours. “Our TAM team worked with the Acquia support team to scale up the platform infrastructure to handle five to six million hits for seven hours during the Super Bowl commercial ad launch,” explained Ismail. “And our TAM’s advice on optimization, performance improvements, and caching insights have made having a technical account manager a required service for us.”
Acquia Cloud Platform’s log forwarding service and the external Loggly platform allow Indegene to administer and monitor logs easily and flexibly. And the Acquia platform’s email helps the Indegene team monitor bounce rates and complaints, blocking recipients when necessary. This ensures that the company can maintain its overall sender reputation, minimizing the potential of outage issues.
“TAM plays a vital role in our overall processes and business strategies. For example, we had some challenges where our configuration was stripping out campaign UTM parameters due to a nonstandard HTTP protocol, and none of the workarounds we tried on our own worked. But our Acquia TAM ultimately recommended a solution that completely resolved the issue,” Ismail shared.
“We believe that good customer service can improve customer satisfaction, and Acquia has played a significant role in helping us provide our customers with great service, making our entire ecosystem very effective. The overall experience has been very fulfilling and satisfying,” said Ismail.
