IQVIA, Salesforce Expand Partnership to Develop Life Sciences Cloud

IQVIA will continue to support its existing OCE customers worldwide through 2029, ensuring a seamless transition to the new platform.

IQVIA, a prominent global provider of data, analytics, technology, and services to the life sciences industry, has expanded its partnership with Salesforce, a leading AI CRM, aimed at accelerating the development of Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud.

This collaboration is expected to advance customer engagement within the global life sciences sector, offering a cutting-edge platform designed to enhance interactions with healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients.

The partnership leverages IQVIA's Orchestrated Customer Engagement (OCE) platform, introduced in 2017, and integrates it with Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud to create a comprehensive end-to-end engagement solution.

By combining Salesforce's leading CRM software with IQVIA's extensive data, domain expertise, and advanced analytics capabilities, the collaboration seeks to transform customer engagement in the life sciences industry.

What Does the Extended Partnership Seek?

One of the key aspects of this expanded partnership is the licensing of OCE CRM-related software to Salesforce by IQVIA.

This strategic move will enable both companies to collaborate on the development of the Life Sciences Cloud for customer engagement, with an anticipated launch in 2025.

Additionally, IQVIA will continue to support its existing OCE customers worldwide through 2029, ensuring a seamless transition to the new platform.

Bernd Haas, senior VP and head of Digital Products and Solutions at IQVIA, highlighted IQVIA's commitment to developing innovative technology solutions across various healthcare verticals to accelerate decision-making processes and drive operational efficiency.

“In collaboration with various strategic partners across multiple healthcare verticals, IQVIA will continue to develop innovative technology solutions to help accelerate decision making across discovery, clinical development, medical affairs, real world evidence generation, patient safety, regulatory compliance, patient engagement and commercial operations,” said Haas.

Frank Defesche, senior VP and GM Life Sciences at Salesforce, echoed this sentiment, describing the collaboration as a pivotal moment for innovation in the Life Sciences Cloud.

“It will transform the future of HCP engagement, bringing together our combined capabilities in CRM, AI, data, and the thought leadership of IQVIA, all on the trusted Einstein 1 Platform,” underscored Defesche.

“This collaboration will provide life science organizations with a single, intelligent end-to-end engagement platform to transform the customer experience to be orchestrated and personalized,” he added.

The Life Sciences Cloud prepares to launch in June 2024, with sales automation functions for pharma/biotech customers expected to be available after September 1, 2025.

Overview of Cloud Application in Life Science Sector

Cloud solutions for the life sciences industry are designed to drive innovation in healthcare and life sciences, revolutionizing research, patient care, and data-driven insights.

These cloud solutions offer a range of benefits, including accelerating time-to-insights, increasing return on investment (ROI), and bringing differentiated therapeutics to market faster.

They also enable secure research collaborations between global teams, simplify data movement from lab equipment, and automate compliance with GxP-regulated workloads.

AWS is a leading provider of cloud solutions for the life sciences industry, with nine out of the top ten pharma companies choosing AWS for data analytics and machine learning.

PwC works with organizations across the life sciences value chain, from big pharma to medtech, biotech, and genomics, to innovate, thrive, and grow in the cloud.

A McKinsey report in 2021 underscores the importance of cloud solutions for the life sciences industry.

The report highlights cloud solutions are seen as key enablers for business innovation, automation, scalability, resilience, and data analytics for Fortune 500 companies in the pharmaceutical and medtech sectors.