SmartAnalytics

CIO -- “I am managing ten applications, eighty five virtual machines, four networks, twenty five IT projects and three data centers. Why can’t the CFO understand what we are doing for the company?” 

With regulations creating these clear boundaries to prevent the "Medical Affairs" teams from being measured by the resulting sales, a common question that I've heard a few times is "Is there something we can measure beyond 'activities'".  Its quite common to find a bunch of metrics and charts that tell you how much time is being spent on various activities and whether they are "responsive" or "pro-active" etc.  But since these end up being "activities" its like reporting and analysis with your hands tied.

Following the success of its Exadata (database as a service) and Exalogic (middleware-as-a-service) engineered systems, Oracle unveiled Exalytics Business Intelligence at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.

Business Intelligence and Data Management Environments are getting complex year after year due to macro industry trends like mergers/acquisitions, rapid growth, outsourcing and others. To maintain the agility of these BI solutions and meet changing business demands, it is imperative that IT teams have  good control on their BI platforms.

Pharma's traditional approach to getting in touch with Physicians and trying to promote their products has been seen as struggling to achieve its goals.  A recent industry report indicated that the number of Physicians who were not accessible has gone up from about 20% about 5 years ago to about 40% in 2010.  Many of these are because the organizations that the Physicians work at are creating policies that prevent sales reps from making calls on their physicians.

In a tough economy, a new tech-fueled BI and analytics arms race is on to create the next competitive advantage. Everyone is beginning to look beyond the status quo in BI, analytics, Big Data, Cloud Computing etc to fundamentally change how they discover fresh insights, how they can make smarter decisions, profit from customer intelligence and social media, and optimize performance management.