TECH OUTLOOKJune -201919Emerging Biopharma Gains Competitive Advantage in the CloudBy Doug Caldwell, Vice President, Customer Architecture, Veeva SystemsThe probability of receiving FDA approval for a new drug is less than 10 percent­and as low as 5.1 percent for oncology medicines. Small and emerging companies typically invest more than a decade of time and money into drug development, with no guarantee of eventual commercial success. They face the same industry-wide challenges as established, larger competitors, but have to succeed with fewer resources.Smaller biopharma companies have a short window to make the shift from focusing purely on research and development to commercialization. Launch success often requires a commercial infrastructure spanning everything from multichannel CRM software to customer reference data, master data management applications, and increasingly, even a data warehouse. Because small life sciences companies do not have the bandwidth or resources to implement a piecemeal commercial infrastructure, they are leading the industry's shift to the cloud."We adopted a `cloud first' strategy so that our commercial infrastructure could easily scale to support long-term growth and enable us to leverage the latest innovations," said Ingo Elfering, Indivior CIO. "We have no physical data centers, and prefer cloud-based solutions to remain agile and poised for change, and ensure that technology never gets in the way of progress."Leading with a cloud-first strategy allows companies to be more responsive to changes across their commercial environment. It also levels the playing field by providing emerging companies access to the same world-class technologies that were once primarily the domain of large enterprises. As technologies, customers, and markets develop, a cloud-first strategy allows these nimble organizations to evolve alongside them.A New Era of Commercial ChallengesCommercial operations seek to enable effective customer engagement, despite increasing regulatory requirements and more `low-see' or `no-see' doctors. Health care professionals (HCPs), meanwhile, demand fundamentally more in-depth scientific conversations, including proof of patient outcomes and economic value. HCPs also expect to use their preferred device at any time, whether CXO INSIGHTS
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