Bangalore-based PharmARC Analytic Solutions Pvt. Ltd, that provides sales and marketing analytics to 80 companies, including 15 of the top 20 global pharma companies, has done sales force sizing and structuring in each of the major European countries for a pharma company.
“Sitting here we could tell them what should be the size of a sales representative’s territory, number of sales rep to be assigned to a district manager, and so on,” says Amit Sardana, chief executive of PharmARC, which is now setting up a US arm.
In its February report, Pharma 2020: Marketing the Future, audit and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers said the pharma industry’s future sales force will be dramatically smaller and will require new skills including “an education in science or health, greater understanding of specific complex diseases and the ability to negotiate with powerful payers and medical specialists.”
Inevitably, this will require use of more real time intelligence that links to heterogeneous data.
“Today, with too much information from multiple sources, the move in the industry is towards ‘single version of truth’,” says Subramanyam V., head, information management, IBM India/South Asia.
Citing an example of adverse event reporting of a drug in the market, he says, the focus now is on getting to the root cause immediately—which could be due to storage, dosage, delivery, even improper vendor qualification of a supplier—and informing the stakeholders in the best possible way, even on mobile phones.
IBM is one of the few companies providing end-to-end products and services in this space, though Subramanyam admits the capability owes much to at least 20 acquisitions that IBM has made in last two-three years. However, there’s room for smaller companies to operate in niche segments.
A 35-year GSK veteran and now a board member of Indegene, Thyagarajan says GSK has now hired a Delhi-based company for its marketing analytics, and is doing “the kind of analysis it has never done before”.
He adds that bigger companies such as IBM can do the high-end marketing analytics which require large computing capabilities.
But Thyagarajan’s optimism about companies such as Indegene, which has around 50 physicians on its rolls, goes beyond sales and marketing. For instance, Indegene is building a “Trialpedia”, a Web-based platform with 75 clinical trial design criteria that could significantly aid drug developers to search and analyze a specific “endpoint” in a drug trial. Pretty “excited” about this product, Thyagarajan thinks it could fetch Indegene a fortune.
The size of the analytics pie is getting bigger. The industry, Sardana says, will need more analysts which will lead to bigger strategic collaborations. “Probably Infosys today has one floor devoted to Bank of America; that concept of ‘owned development centre’ will come in the pharma analytics business also.”
In the process smaller ones may get gobbled up by bigger companies, just like Cognizant Technology Solutions acquired Gurgaon-based MarketRX Inc. in late 2007 for $135 million.
Will Indegene be up for grabs anytime soon?