Cegedim launches ver. 9 of its Mobile Intelligence CRM platform

In a race to dominate the fast-evolving market for cloud-based CRM solutions for life sciences, Cegedim Relationship Management has commercialized Mobile Intelligence, ver. 9. The company says that MI9 is the only life sciences platform that supports both Windows and Apple operating systems. While Microsoft is late to the new-generation interactive tablet market, thoroughly dominated by the Apple iPad, there is a potential significant value in using Microsoft’s Surface tablet—ready compatibility with the range of Microsoft Office tools, such as Word and Excel. “Corporate IT managers will want to simplify their operating system support, and individual users will want to be able to switch seamlessly from their presentation tablet to a laptop or desktop PC,” notes Drew Bustos, global communications manager at Cegedim’s Bedminster, NJ, US headquarters.

Other new elements of MI9 include enhanced multimedia closed-loop marketing (CLM) features, enabling marketing and sales teams to design and present multimedia presentations with global control of approved content, and seamless integration with OneKey Digital, Cegedim’s international healthcare professionals (HCPs) master-data management service. The company is also offering a new module, Contact Center, that enables a pharma company (or its outsourced service provider) to automatically link calls or messages from HCPs (such as sample requests, follow-up questions and the like) to the contact database maintained by field reps. OneKey Digital is currently being enhanced with syndicated data on the “social media footprint” of HCPs, matching their social-media activity with their master data.

Cegedim Relationship Management, a unit of Paris-based Cegedim SA, claims over 200,000 users of its CRM solutions worldwide, but is in an intense dogfight with Veeva (Pleasanton, CA) which came out with a cloud-based CRM solution several years ago and is now said to lead in the US in market share. (The Cegedim announcement, perhaps not accidentally, comes out the week before Veeva's US users group meeting.) Both these companies are contesting a US market that is flat or declining in numbers of sales reps pharma companies are putting out in the field.