Veeva offers a data-warehousing service tailored to life sciences

A data warehouse is commonly understood to be a way to store structured data—for example, sales reports—in a way that makes retrieval or performing analytics faster and easier. Inevitably, once a warehouse is built, some other department or business function wants to add another data set to it for more comprehensive analysis. Now, Veeva wants to address this problem by making a tailored (and customizable) warehouse expressly for its life sciences clients. The service is being branded as Nitro.

“There is no industry standard, pre-built data warehouse available to life sciences,” states Paul Shawah, SVP, commercial cloud strategy, for Veeva. “At best, IT developers take tools developed for data warehousing, and build from scratch. That takes time, and almost as soon as the warehouse is built, it’s out of date.” In practice, Nitro is intended to let Veeva clients pour structured data into it and then apply business-intelligence or AI tools on top, to get meaningful results quickly.

And of course, coming from Veeva, all of this is going to happen in the cloud. Nitro is built on Amazon Redshift, said to be a powerful petabyte-scale data warehouse infrastructure, and ensuring a high level of scalability and fast-query performance even on the largest data sets. CRM data is the first prebuilt version. Veeva Nitro will have an extensible data model that’s based on industry best practices, and seamlessly integrates with Veeva CRM. Also, industry data connectors can bring together data from the most common sources such as prescription, sales, formulary, and claims data, including regional data from IQVIA and from Encise, a Japanese data provider.

Nitro is available in the Japanese pharma market now, and will be available in the US by the end of this year, says Shawah. An early-adopter program is already being enrolled. Veeva will be expanding Nitro applications in the future for other Veeva data services.

Nitro was announced at Veeva’s Commercial & Medical Summit (Philadelphia, May 15-17). The company also took the occasion to announce enhancements to Veeva CRM, its original cloud-based offering. These enhancements include a new user interface and better synching of real-time data across multiple mobile platforms, including Apple IOS and Windows-based tablets and devices.