Pioneering mail-order pharmacy in Europe relies on NTT Europe Online

Founded in 2000, DocMorris has overcome an enormous number of legal and compliance hurdles to achieve its vision of creating a mail-order pharmacy within its key market Germany. The rewards have been enormous growth, 700,000 paying customers, a huge amount of press coverage and a brand that claims to be the largest mail-order pharmacy in Europe. DocMorris’ offering covers more than 20,000 different products that are constantly kept in stock. Ralf Däinghaus, the founder, was awarded "German Entrepeneur of the Year" in 2003 for his efforts and vision in creating this successful business.

Since the European Court of Justice allowed mail order selling of pharmaceuticals at the end of 2003, the number of people ordering their drugs at DocMorris grew steadily and the limitations of the existing infrastructure rapidly became apparent. To prevent the company experiencing downtime or poor availability - both would have caused enormous costs and a serious loss of reputation – a new solution had to be found quickly.

Flexible solution

The new infrastructure needed to be highly available, reliable, secure and flexible, had to support the company’s growth and had to be migrated online without any down time as the business needed to keep operating. NTT Europe Online designed, implemented and now manages a high availability web infrastructure.

“NTT Europe Online comprehensively, flexibly and professionally met all our requirements and these aspects are still essential as we work in a dynamic growth market,” Ralf Däinghaus, Founder and Member of Executive Board, DocMorris N.V.

Growing requirements

The solution designed by NTT Europe Online scales with the development of the company and is able to cope flexibly with future growth.

“At the beginning of our relationship with NTT Europe Online, in 2002, we received about 500 orders per day – now we’re talking about 5,000. This development wouldn’t have been possible without the reliable and flexible services, technical expertise and service level guarantees of NTT Europe Online.”

“It was important for us, as the market leader, to work with a professional partner that would support our requirements in a reliable, quick and flexible way,” concludes Ralf Däinghaus. “We found such a partner in NTT Europe Online.”