IMS Health chooses Amazon Web Services for its cloud offerings

At Amazon’s Re:Invent meeting (Nov. 11-14, Las Vegas) IMS Health announced a decision to mount its cloud services, Nexxus Commercial Application Suite and IMS One cloud, wholly on Amazon’s AWS cloud platform. It’s not exactly a brave step into the unknown—AWS is a leading provider of cloud-based resources worldwide, and many pharma companies are already using it directly. But it does put essentially all of IMS’ cloud offerings in one basket, which are likely to be massive data loads, given that IMS Health tracks pharma and healthcare data around the world. And this is occurring as parts of the life sciences universe are deeply embedded in cloud services (such as clinical research) and others (such as manufacturing and supply chain management) are still grappling with cloud security and access issues.

The company has built out a suite of offerings for commercial activity, including integrated, multi-channel marketing campaign management, CRM, social media vigilance and cross-company analytics, and business intelligence and key performance indicator tools. The IMS One cloud integrates data sourced from IMS with client and third-party information sources, creating a single, trusted view that in turn can be accessed by the Nexxus commercial applications.

“Our hosting on AWS answers the growing customer need for flexible and accessible cloud solutions backed by IMS Health’s deep understanding of local markets and global information security practices,” said Sati Sian, senior vice president, Global Technology & Operations, IMS Health, in a statement.