Here is the second part of my thoughts from last week’s initial blog post about the article on the use of SaaS in the pharmaceutical industry. The article was written in PharmaVOICE and was titled Software as a Service Gaining Traction. This article documents the comments of thought leaders in the pharmaceutical industry concerning the adoption of SaaS software by pharmaceutical companies. The complete article can be found at http://www.pharmavoice.com/archives/article.esiml?id=2012. My blog post will document what I believe are the most relevant and thought provoking comments.
THOUGHT LEADERS WHO PARTICIPATED Ken Arbadji. VP, StayinFront, a global provider of CRM and decision-support solutions. For more information, visit stayinfront.com. Leila Daiuto. Sales Director, Axentis, a part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, which provides governance, risk, and compliance management software. For more information, visit axentis.com. Jamie Duke. Chief Operating Officer, SciQuest Inc., which provides global procurement automation and supplier enablement solutions. For more information, visit sciquest.com. Dominic John. Director of Software Marketing, Symyx Technologies Inc., a provider of software solutions for the electronic laboratory environment that transform scientific R&D. For more information, visit symyx.com. DeWayne Manning, R.Ph. President, DiseaseTrak, a specialty healthcare services company that creates and manages patient management solutions. For more information, visit diseasetrak.com. Ken Parmelee. Director of Application Development, Antenna Software, which enables organizations to design, build, deploy, and manage secure mobile applications. For more information, visit antennasoftware.com. Jo Ann Saitta. Senior VP, PDI Inc., which provides commercialization services for established and emerging biopharmaceutical companies. For more information, visit pdi-inc.com. Nagaraja Srivatsan. VP and Head of Life Sciences, North America, Cognizant, which offers IT, consulting, analytics, and business process outsourcing services to global pharma, biotech, and medical-device companies. For more information, visit cognizant.com. Matt Wallach. Executive VP and General Manager, Veeva Systems, which develops SaaS applications for the global life-sciences industry. For more information, visit veevasystems.com. Steve Webb. Chairman, Interactive Medica, which supplies SaaS applications to the life-sciences industry. For more information, visit interactivemedica.com. Mike Wexler. Founding Principal, Biltmore Technologies Inc., which offers SaaS business intelligence solutions and technology consulting to sales and marketing divisions of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. For more information, visit biltmoretech.com or e-mail mwexler@biltmoretech.com.
Cost – Here is an overview of how these thought leaders believe SaaS can affect costs in pharma:
Wexler; Biltmore. Furthermore our analysis on software as a service sales and marketing data warehousing and reporting solutions show a 74% savings in the total cost of ownership.
Saitta; PDI. In my experience, up to 50% of the costs associated with licensing maintenance fees and hosting can be saved, which is very significant savings. Most software as a service models are subscription-based models, so rather than committing to three years of a specific platform or hardware that the company owns the subscription allows a user to pay month by month or year by year.
Wallach; VEEVA SYSTEMS. In our experience, life sciences companies can save 10% to 50% of their annual ongoing costs by moving to a mature software as a service platform.
Duke; SciQuest. Perhaps most importantly, in many functional areas the inherent architecture of software as a service enables organizations to be more productive and save money.
Srivatsan; Cognizant. Software as a service provides predictability of costs to the services that are being procured. In the long run, companies save money as they do not have upfront costs on infrastructure and the models will scale with the growth of their business.
John;SYMYX. Typically the pharmaceutical industry is slow to adapt and move to the latest information systems, however current economic pressures and trends are forcing companies to reduce and control informatics spending, as well as support distributed partners and outsourced capabilities
Parmalee; ATENNA SOFTWARE. With the economic pressures pharmaceutical companies are dealing with, they are all aggressively pushing towards external services.
Flexibility – and finally, how SaaS can increase flexibility:
Steve Webb; Interactive Medica. Software as a service enables companies to change marketing and business processes quickly.
Daiuto. AXENTIS. Software as a service offers pharmaceutical organizations the ability to get up and running quickly when there may be little time to build, customize, maintain, or integrated homegrown or existing installed applications.
Saitta; PDI. Software as a service is highly cost-effective, but other important benefits include flexibility, speed to market, and the ability to quickly change configurations in response to business dynamics. Software as a service gives the user control of managing the configuration, the way it looks, feels, and what information it will contain.
Srivatsan; Cognizant. Software as a service provides predictability of costs to the services that are being procured. In the long run, companies save money as they do not have upfront costs on infrastructure and the models will scale with the growth of their business.
Dewayne Manny; Disease Track. Many software as a service solutions can be implemented in less than 45 days without extensive rework or customization of the in-house solution.
Arbadji; STAYINFRONT; the monthly payment model with reduced, upfront cost is also very appealing. But it all boils down to efficiency; companies today are looking to provide their employees with the tools they need to improve their effectiveness in terms of both time and money.
Mike Wexler; Biltmore Technologies. Software as a service provides a zero footprint solution, the client does not need to develop or support the application or maintain hardware, software, or data center.
About the Author
John McGee is the founder of OptifiNow. OptifiNow, is an industry leader in SaaS based solutions designed to optimize the effectiveness of the sales force. Although OptifiNow’s platform is modular in design it offers a fully integrated solution that allows a company to define and automate a company specific benchmark sales processes and provide all the required tools that includes Lead Management, CRM, and Sales Enablement all designed by and tailored for use by the sales force. OptifiNow enables multi-channel timely, relevant, brand and regulatory compliant communication. OptifiNow supports Direct Mail, Email, Digital Print, SMS, Social, and Telephonic channels of communication.
Comments