In the last nine months, company officials say, 15 life sciences companies have signed with Verticals onDemand, a vendor of SaaS (News - Alert) CRM products for the pharmaceutical industry. Verticals onDemand’s latest customer, U.K.-based ProStrakan Group, selected VBioPharma shortly after establishing their U.S. division earlier this year.

 

Verticals onDemand’s client roster also includes biotechnology companies.

 

ProStrakan has been recruiting both specialty and managed markets sales representatives to commercialize ProStrakan’s products in the United States. The sales force will promote the company’s new oncology supportive care product, currently under FDA review. Verticals onDemand’s professional services team is now implementing VBioPharma to the managed markets account team at ProStrakan.

 

“I already knew the pluses and minuses of most of the major pharma CRM vendors from previous experience,” said Paul Bidawid, Vice President of Managed Markets & Supply Chain at ProStrakan.”SaaS is definitely where we’re heading.”

 

One industry analyst, Datamonitor, predicted just such a major industry shift in a Pharma CRM report published last year, titled ”Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM Vendor in the Pharmaceutical Industry.”

 

VBioPharma is a CRM product to come pre-validated for PDMA and CFR Part 11 compliance. Built on the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com (News - Alert), VBioPharma physician and account profiling, visual affiliations tracking, call scheduling and route management, call reporting and mobile call reporting with electronic signature capture and full samples management.

 

Matt Wallach, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Verticals onDemand, said SaaS technology is “much more flexible and cost-effective than client/server systems of ten years ago, making it attractive to pharma and biotech companies.” VBioPharma runs in a disconnected mode on smart phones, laptops, and tablet PCs.

 

“In the not so distant past, companies built their entire organization around their old bricks and mortar systems. Pharma companies today simply cannot invest financial resources in these types of infrastructure,” said Bidawid.

 

In February Verticals onDemand launched VBioPharma Primary Care Edition CRM application for life sciences organizations. Company officials say this is the first CRM application pre-validated for PDMA and the Food and Drug Administration’s CFR Part 11 compliance,” saving customers up to 80 percent of their system validation costs.”

 

The vendor sells an out-of-the-box call reporting and sampling system with IQ and OQ documentation for reducing costs and the risk of being issued a damaging consent decree from the federal government.

 

“The consequences of not properly validating your system can be devastating,” said Patrick P. Den Boer, CEO of Q Pharma, a regulatory compliance consulting service.”At the very least, a company will be issued an FD-483, which damages a company’s reputation. At the worst, a company could enter into a consent decree costing the organization millions of dollars in fines, and even shutting down the facility.”

 

VBioPharma is described by company officials as “the industry’s first SaaS CRM product for primary care and the only Pharma CRM product to come pre-validated.” It’s built on the Force.com platform, and has functions for physician and account profiling, tracking physician and account affiliations and call scheduling and route management.