Managed IT Services Tailored to Needs of Biopharma

Just as biopharma companies are growing more comfortable with software-as-a-service (SaaS) for customer-relationship management, accounting and other IT functions, now it is being offered “IT in a box” to have a preconfigured, validated IT infrastructure through a managed services agreement (MSA). Such MSAs are an increasingly common feature of the IT industry, but the innovation here is to structure the MSA specifically for biopharma needs.

“We’ve been offering various types of managed services, such as handling corporate e-mail, disaster recovery and others for quite a while,” says John Biglin, CEO of Interphase Systems (Plymouth Meeting, PA). “We’ve realized that there is value in bundling all these capabilities as one offering, which we call Ready-IT BioPharma.”

Ready-IT is structured a la carte to meet various IT requirements in biopharma, including CRM, ERP, voice and data communications, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance. The company has also offered a tailored corrective-and-preventive-action (CAPA) managed service for handling FDA compliance issues. Interphase is most familiar with Microsoft-based enterprise tools, but some IT applications are defined by user requirements. Biglin says that although the service is most suitable for small to mid-size biopharma companies, Interphase has worked with several Big Pharma firms on specific IT applications. “Small to mid-size companies need to have industrial-strength IT infrastructures, but often don’t want to tie up capital or management resources in building their own systems,” he says.