Following through on a commitment it made last April to develop a partnered group of vendors for secure pharma distribution, Axway (Scottsdale, AZ) has announced an alliance with Blue Vector (Palo Alto, CA), a “network appliances” company, and Gephardt, a logistics-systems supplier based in Cham, Germany. Another new relationship is with Aegate, a product-authentication technology developer (Cambridge, MA).

With regard to secure pharmaceutical distribution, the alliance hangs off Axway’s Supply Chain Integrity Suite, which in turn is based on the company’s Synchrony IT platform to exchanging information between trading partners. Synchrony has applications tailored for track and trace applications, for e-pedigree and for related trade-activity management functions. As Axway describes it, pharmaceutical packing cases (which may themselves be tagged with RFID labels or other serialized identifiers) could be transported inside a DC with totes, dollies or other conveying equipment that has been tagged by Gephardt. Blue Vector’s “intelligent edge solutions,” which combine tag readers with data-collection and transmission capabilities, would track a package through intermediate locations, triggering event messages that are compiled and analyzed by Axway software.

To date, Aegate’s focus has been on a product-authentication system (now in use in Belgium and Italy) that reads labels or tags at a destination (such as a pharmacy) and confirms authenticity with the product manufacturer. This “book end” approach is in contrast to U.S.-style pedigree systems, that ensure product integrity by tracking a shipment through a supply chain. Aegate is a technology spinout from PA Consulting Group (Cambridge, MA), which does considerable consulting work in life sciences.

Axway’s business might be getting a boost from its parent, Paris-based Sopra Group, which announced the acquisition of Tumbleweed Communications (Redwood City, CA), which specializes in secure content delivery over the Internet. Tumbleweed has more than 150 existing customers among healthcare providers and payers, and manages security of transmissions among them.