Bank on IT

With drug sales continuing to decline, pharmaceutical companies are pinching their pennies and closely picking and choosing what areas they should invest in. Unfortunately, infrastructure technology is one of the more expensive areas, and also one of the first to be scaled back. From manufacturing mainframes to desktop computers, almost every aspect of IT is being evaluated. And if an existing solution is working, chances are that a non–mission critical update will be skipped, or a new installation will be put on the back burner. Pharm Exec reached out to some of the biggest players in IT to find out what advice they're giving to life sciences firms that are more interested in investing in dollars and cents than ones and zeroes.

IN THE CLOUDS
Mike Naimoli
Director of US Life Sciences, Microsoft, Health Solutions Group

Pharmaceutical companies should consider an elastic service in which customers pay for computational services when they need it. By moving services into the digital cloud, companies can move not only their storage capabilities, but also compute programs to the Web at a variable cost. Then not only can they get away from the fixed cost of managing their own data centers, they can also leverage their partner company's internal resources. Those people can write applications for the cloud rather than have the pharma install them and maintain them internally. The best part is that you can pay for those applications when you use them rather than depreciate the fixed cost over a period of time.