Veeva, Cegedim announce new partnerships and IT alliances in pharma salesforce automation

No surprise that the head-to-head competition in salesforce automation between Veeva (Pleasanton, CA) and Cegedim Relationship Management (Bedminster, NJ)—now a business unit of IMS Health—has continued into 2015. In Cegedim’s case, Publicis Touchpoint (Yardley, PA), a leading contract-sales organization (CSO), has announced a “strategic relationship” with Cegedim that will place Mobile Intelligence, Cegedim’s flagship CRM system, as its platform of choice for deployment to its field forces. While Veeva’s system was one of the first to “go to the cloud,” at least for biopharma clients, Cegedim’s MI was the first that worked on both the iPad and Microsoft-powered tablets (which Veeva has as well). In the past, Touchpoint has noted that it was the first pharma CSO to adopt Veeva’s platform; but it, and most other leading CSOs, will use either system or a client’s preferred platform if so desired by the client.

Meanwhile, Veeva announced a key partnership in Europe with BMI System (Montrouge, France), which markets the NAYA Transparency Solution for tabulating pharma spending and related compliance issues with healthcare providers. NAYA will be integrated with Veeva’s Customer Master software, its solution for customer master-data management (MDM). MDM is critical to accurate spend reporting in order to properly attribute spending to specific HCPs or healthcare organizations.

Like the Physicians Sunshine Act and its aggregate-spending rules in the US, Europe is moving, country by country, to an agg-spending regulatory framework. While the US’ is mandatory, Europe’s started with the voluntary reporting guideline issued by EFPIA, a pan-European pharma trade association. Various countries (leading with France) are putting the EFPIA guidance into their national healthcare regulations, or using it as a model; ultimately, industry sources indicate, most of Europe will have an agg-spending requirement. “A complete, clean customer master is the prerequisite for accurate spend reporting, but it's often the missing part of the equation, said Guillaume Rousseau, director of strategy for Veeva Network in Europe, in a statement. “Bringing Veeva Network customer master together with BMI System’s NAYA solution together greatly accelerates our customers' ability to meet EFPIA requirements through seamless implementation, saving them developing costly and laborious custom-built systems.”

Earlier, in December, Cegedim announced another IT partnership of its own, with Aktana, a San Francisco developer of software for life sciences marketing, to provide “real time, in-context and in-workflow decision-making support” for field sales reps. Derek Choy, Co-Founder and Vice President of Product at Aktana. “By partnering with Cegedim, we're able to enhance the entire sales process from strategy mapping to on-the-ground daily decisions, and deliver it through a platform the customer already knows, uses daily, and trusts,” said Derek Choy, cofounder and VP of product at Aktana.

“As data insights become increasingly important to interactions with healthcare professionals, said Laurent Labrune, Cegedim CEO, “Aktana’s Decision Support Engine helps commercial teams to take the next best action faster—enabling enterprises to better realize their business goals directly from Mobile Intelligence.”