Microsoft & PAREXEL News: Life Sciences Industry Partnership
 |
Register now: Getting to Approval Faster Through Technology Innovation webinar |
This October, Microsoft and PAREXEL announced news of a strategic partnership, which we believe has the potential to accelerate digital transformation in the life sciences industry as a whole. In this blog post, I’d like to take you behind the scenes of this partnership was established, and explain why it makes sense as a big bet for Microsoft.
We first started talking seriously to PAREXEL about partnering in January of 2017. At that time we were looking across many industries, trying to understand which ones had the greatest imperative to embrace digital transformation. Our analysis led us to two conclusions – the life sciences industry really needed to digitally transform, and doing so would be a significant challenge.
The great news for us was that PAREXEL was seeing the same thing, and most crucially, was looking to do something about it. The PAREXEL team shared with us a set of life science technology solutions that meet many of the needs of the industry today, but will need significant change to remain relevant in the future. It rapidly became apparent that through a strategic partnership with PAREXEL, they could transform their products and services, and in turn, Microsoft could help drive digital transformation in the Life Sciences industry. Change that we know from experience is essential for accelerating business growth in today’s economy.
Once the two organizations realized that the partnership made business sense, it was time to do the hard work of making the partnership a reality. PAREXEL’s existing architecture was, unsurprisingly, quite similar to many of the life sciences customers they serve – lots of individual life science technology choices, with complex integration to make it all work smoothly. But our shared goal was to change this. Together, we would build a flexible architecture where customers could pick the solutions they need, but where the business value of those solutions would improve over time. As life sciences companies chose more PAREXEL solutions, their environment would become progressively easier to maintain, and they would gain more insight across the value chain.
To help focus our efforts, we jointly established three key design principles. First, we would build out an industry specific set of capabilities that fully leveraged the Microsoft public cloud platform (known as Microsoft Azure). This will allow our customers to reap the benefits of the billions of dollars of continuous investment we make to enhancing our cloud services every year. Second, we would simplify and enhance the end-user experience. Microsoft has invested heavily in this area in recent years, and combined with PAREXEL’s deep industry expertise, there is a real opportunity to improve employee productivity and satisfaction inside life sciences companies. Finally, we would build out a common data platform as the basis for the PAREXEL solution. This will help life sciences customers to maximize the value of data in their organization, initially through more effective data sharing, but ultimately through advanced analytics and AI capabilities that we build out jointly with PAREXEL and their customers.
From these design principles emerged a product roadmap that we will be sharing with our customers in the coming weeks and months. PAREXEL and Microsoft have already been working jointly to start building out components of this roadmap. Ultimately we plan to move beyond providing enhanced versions of existing products, into creating entirely new innovative solutions for the next generation of challenges that life sciences customers need to address, from creating truly effective adaptive clinical trials, to personalized medicine and the effective use of real world evidence.
As we have started to share the Microsoft and PAREXEL news story with our joint customers, one theme has emerged that initially we have found quite surprising. Life Sciences companies are sharing with us that not only are they excited by the strategic bet we are making, but they see it as a means of accelerating their own internal changes. Most life sciences companies today are in the early stages of digital transformation. They are many interesting use cases, such as the ones I highlighted here, but progress to date is slow, and much of that slowness is due to technology, regulatory and cultural challenges that are truly challenging to resolve. PAREXEL’s comprehensive adoption of public cloud services will allow them to provide a set of precedents for the industry as a whole, and life sciences customers will be able to follow the pattern that PAREXEL has established. This is exactly the kind of change that we want to see in the life sciences industry, and we are confident that this partnership will help drive it.
For more on how cloud-based technologies can power the next growth wave in pharmaceuticals, check out our free Why Cloud for Pharma ebook.
