March 12, 2007
EMC Corporation
Roberta Katz
Director, Global Solutions Lead, Healthcare-Life Sciences
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
EMC has expanded our offerings to the life sciences industry over the last five years through technology innovation, and an acquisition strategy of industry-leading solution vendors such as Documentum, Legato, VMWare, Network Intelligence, and RSA Security.
In 2006, EMC enjoyed a record year of growth across its systems, software, and services offerings as organizations with increasingly complex IT environments turned to EMC's portfolio to better store, protect, optimize, and leverage their expanding volumes of information.
EMC works closely with our life science industry customers, leading industry groups and government agencies to design solutions and services that streamline the information lifecycle from drug discovery through commercialization. Many of the world's top life sciences organizations — including 25 of the largest pharmaceutical companies and seven FDA centers — rely on their EMC intelligent information infrastructure to store, protect, optimize, and leverage valuable digital assets.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
We expect life sciences companies to continue to drive advances in science through innovation. We believe intelligent technology investments can help our customers accelerate the collaboration and feedback process needed to deliver innovative medicines that are required to move us even closer to personalized medicine. At the same time, EMC will continue to advance our products and solutions to meet the requirements of the diverse stakeholders that deploy our technology throughout the life sciences value chain. All of these folks are contributing to treating, curing, and preventing disease — large pharmaceutical companies around the world, small biotech start-ups, healthcare providers, physicians, government agencies, and insurers who will look at information in a more unified way in the coming years.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
With the stakes in drug development so high, EMC helps our customers leverage information technology to further accelerate time-to-revenue for new drugs and medical devices. We focus on solutions that streamline the drug discovery process while reducing clinical and administrative costs, facilitate collaboration among researchers, protect against data loss, and ensure compliance with regulations.
EMC’s storage systems, information management, information protection and resource management software, and related customer and professional services give customers the competitive advantage.
Right now, we are working on a wide range of projects with our customers including tiered-networked storage so they can match storage resources to the service level requirements of their key business applications; content management and archiving; information availability; high-performance computing; eDiscovery; and regulatory compliance.
Our EMC Documentum Compliance Platform for Life Sciences helps organizations create and approve regulated content such as regulatory submissions and ensures secure, accurate maintenance of operations documentation and records. We also enable efficient creation of consistent, accurate, and compliant advertising, product promotions, labeling, and package inserts.
In the highly regulated life sciences industry, the recent acquisition of RSA Security provides our customers with solutions in identity assurance and access control, encryption and key management, compliance and security information management, and fraud protection. And to further control costs, VMWare, Rainfinity, and Invista provide a broad range of virtualization solutions to decouple the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
Since 2002, EMC has strengthened our partner portfolio as we build integrated, tested solutions that meet life sciences customer requirements. EMC carefully nurtures our broad network of partners, which includes complementary software, specific independent software vendor (ISV) offerings, systems integration, consulting services, and vertical solutions. We team with our partners to deliver intelligent information infrastructure, enabling our customers to put their information to work and better leverage its value.
We are in the business of helping our life sciences customers become more productive. So we spend time with our customers to understand their specific IT environment and the specific application vendors they are working with — whether it’s drug discovery and development, clinical trials, regulatory approval, manufacturing and operations, sales and marketing, or customer service. These partners cover the life sciences continuum from early research to patient care delivery. And our partnerships reflect this approach — SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, Agilent, GE Healthcare, Siemens, McKesson, MEDITECH, Agfa, Cellomics, Impact Systems, and more.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
EMC keeps up to date on gathering intelligence on emerging information management and storage technologies that will affect your IT infrastructure — and your business. Although we can’t share specifics about what we have in development, your readers can be assured that EMC will continue to help life sciences companies gain greater IT efficiencies through grid, virtualization, orchestration, and service-oriented infrastructures.
Where do you see your company in five years?
In five years, organizations will continue to face more information; more regulations governing the use, access, and retention of this information; and more concerns about security and power efficiency. EMC will continue to address these evolving customer requirements by providing the technology and services that will help customers’ information infrastructures.