Reltio targets pharma sales and marketing with 'data as a service'

For most pharma organizations, the ability to perform analytics on top of data-generating applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) or multichannel marketing (MCM) is the new state of the art. By gathering and analyzing such data, trends can be captured quickly and then reacted to. Like many, many other players in this Big Data space, Reltio (Palo Alto, CA) offers its capabilities to rapidly bring in diverse data sources together, draw linkages and derive trends, but unlike most, it comes to the activity from the field of master data management (MDM) — the task of gathering together accurate client demographic information and keeping it updated. And while it is offering its services to a variety of industries, it has already targeted life sciences MDM as a core market, and hired executives from companies such as Veeva (the CRM vendor), Informatica and Siperian. Most recently, it announced winning $10 million from two private-equity firms, Crosslink Capital and .406 Ventures.

Reltio has been developing its life sciences/MDM applications for some time, and part of the activity is lining up key MDM players, including MedPro Systems, Health Market Science and LexisNexis/Enclarity, and systems integrators like HighPoint Solutions and Cognizant. A newly announced “platinum partner” is ZS Associates, widely used in life sciences for consulting on sales operations.

Manish Sood, CEO, likens what Reltio is doing to LinkedIn and Facebook, in the form of a “commercial graph” (see illustration) that shows linkages among clients and prospects. “For pharma companies, working with MDM and CRM calls for subscribing to multiple data sources and hiring IT staffs and data scientists to manage the data; with our data-as-a-service approach, we’re trying to relieve IT departments of that, while providing usable results in real time.” Reltio’s business partners will be able to provide access to their data on an as-needed basis.

A typical example, says Sood, would be a sponsored dinner meeting where an unexpected guest shows up. To ensure that that guest has the right credentials (thereby avoiding the implication of off-label marketing), the sales team could, in theory, check out the guest’s credentials on the spot. Sood says that the company is working on delivering formulary information, which would assist sales teams in identifying marketing opportunities in time to take advantage of formulary changes. The company is already working with “multiple” pharma and med device clients, he says.