By John Russell
Oct. 9, 2008 | Many folks wonder what Microsoft’s eventual play in the life sciences will be. Clearly biomedical research looks more and more like an exercise in digital content integration, management, and mining. Within the last few years, Microsoft – and others – awakened to opportunities in healthcare writ large, and to biomedical research as a key piece of that enterprise.
To a large extent, Microsoft’s healthcare play has followed its traditional dependence in independent software vendor partners building solutions on top of Microsoft products. Yet its Amalga “product” is an enterprise-scale data integration solution sold directly to big hospitals, and apparently, Microsoft is building a specialized version of Amalga for the life sciences, which will be ready soon.
Where is Microsoft going in life sciences? Michael Naimoli is the industry solutions director for Microsoft’s U.S. Health & Life Sciences Group. He is responsible for driving industry technical strategy, business and partner development, solution sales and marketing for the life science vertical markets. Naimoli spoke with Predictive Biomedicine Editor John Russell and provided a glimpse into Microsoft’s growing ambitions and strategy for becoming even more formidable in the life sciences market.
JR: Let’s start with the mission of the U.S. Health & Life Sciences (HLS) Group. What is it, and what’s your role?
Naimoli: Well, it’s a group that’s run by Steve Aylward (general manager), and he has vertical directors for three groups: providers, plans, and life sciences. I’m the director of the life sciences group. Overall, the life sciences unit is responsible for providing vertical messages around the Microsoft platform. So, for instance, my group in particular focuses on pharma, biotech, and medical device companies. We take the Microsoft suite of products and we work with partners to build solutions themselves, or we work directly with customers and their internal developer organizations and help them build solutions that meet their needs in the enterprise.
JR: Microsoft has clearly paid more attention to the healthcare and science markets in recent years. Give us a sense of the organization’s growth.
Naimoli: Seven years ago there were approximately five people focused on healthcare worldwide at Microsoft; now there are more than 700. My group is responsible primarily for the enterprise space (in biopharma and medical devices), so these are the largest customers in the U.S. The goal of my crew is not really to go and talk about products, but to go in and talk about solutions for the business – so get out of IT and have conversations with the business decision-makers around what are they trying to do and how can Microsoft help.
JR: Who are you having those conversations with?
Naimoli: Well, we try and focus outside of IT, so the vice president of clinical development, discovery decision sciences, sales and marketing, medical affairs, manufacturing – key decision-makers in those arenas. Occasionally the CIO – we certainly talk to the CIO and his or her organization, but our conversation is about how they service their customers within the organization and what their customers are looking for.
JR: Is it fair to say life sciences is a smaller piece of the total HLS business?
Naimoli: Yes. I would say it is. I can’t talk about specifics, but we definitely can hang with the rest of the group.
JR: It sounds like much of your effort is directly with customers rather than working through partners. Is that the case?
Naimoli: Yes, it’s fairly large. Microsoft offers a lot out-of-the-box and the office platform and our servers, but one thing we don’t want to lose sight of are developers who are working within these organizations. (These are) developers that for long time have been writing applications on our competitors’ platforms. They are often fans of open source software. We do provide standards-based solutions for the industry.
So the way we’ve been dealing with that group has been to go in and demonstrate what our platform can do with respect to data visualization and workflow and collaboration. We have them look at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), for example, and we’re working to have them think, “I’m going to write to WPF or I’m going to learn about WPF.” Or we have them look at HPC Server 2008 and say, “Maybe high-performance computing on a Microsoft platform is something that we have to look at and consider writing applications to it.” That’s becoming a bigger part of my group’s focus.
JR: Are there a few projects and specific customers you could cite?
Naimoli:Well, I would refer to what we did with Eli Lilly and the Orion project. It was about bringing in (to Lilly) PerformancePoint Server and Project Server to provide data visualization and project milestone information to the enterprise. We’re also looking at releasing a case study in the near future around the Scripps Research Institute and what they are doing with respect to high-performance computing on HPC Server.
JR: Is that the ‘collaborative molecular environment’ they fashioned and are using?
Naimoli: No, this is something different. The collaborative molecule environment is a good example – it’s a 3D Wiki.
JR: Are there other examples you can mention?
Naimoli: There’s work we’ve done with Novartis Biomedical Institute of Research. We built the decision support environment. That’s a solution that pulls together project data and all of the documentation around the project data into a single system. That was throughout Novartis. It allows them to collect project information and to collaborate with one another regardless of location. So managers have what they need to achieve faster decisions. The Scripps case will be out soon.
JR: When you look at what Microsoft can deliver to life science clients, is that restricted to collaboration, visualization, data integration, etc., as opposed to the biological analytics themselves? I’m thinking of things like pathway tool analysis and specialized databases.
Naimoli: Well, Microsoft is not necessarily in the foreseeable future going to come out with tools with that kind of functionality. You’re not going to be able to proteomic and genomic searches on our tools. But working with our partners and becoming a platform of choice for that is where Microsoft is going.
JR: What are your priorities in the next 12 months?
Naimoli: Our priorities are really mapped against our customers’ priorities, and they are desperately concerned with their pipelines right now. How can we help them do better science, faster? And that is something that’s required us to work in partnership with companies. Looking towards the future, I have to say my group and Microsoft as a whole are getting better and better engaged with the discovery organization within pharma and biotech,
JR: Is that a new thing? Were you previously not so engaged there, and what are you encountering?
Naimoli: It is a new thing, yes. As you know, they are Linux and UNIX bastions. It’s really around not so much replacing them but putting ourselves in a situation where we can consume information and be able to work with those platforms as well. That’s one area that we are focusing on going forward. Sales and marketing effectiveness is another area. With Schering Plough’s announcement most recently about cutting sales people from the workforce, following Pfizer’s similar announcement, companies are looking at doing more with less. The traditional selling model is not so much selling direct to physicians anymore but, how do you develop a sales force that can also sell to prescription benefits managers and (healthcare) plan organizations? Patient adherence is another. There’s one or two projects we’re working on with companies around impacting the adherence of patient populations to their therapies. It’s cheaper to pay for a pill than it is for a hospital bed.
JR: How does your group relate to Microsoft’s BioIT Alliance?
Naimoli: The BioIT Alliance is an organization made of partners from the industry, and it’s run out of the worldwide group so I don’t work with it directly. There is a chance to present to them. I can tell you our plan in the not-so-distant future is to provide them with code that we’re working on – live code around data visualization; that’s something we are going to be providing to the BioIT Alliance.
JR: How is acceptance of HPC Server and what’s the argument that it’s an appropriate platform for science?
Naimoli: The argument is that it’s scalable, it’s a lot more affordable than the incumbent, and it’s Microsoft so it’s something you can actually have on a server next to your desk, rather than cueing up in a long cue of processes that has to be run by the current mainframe solution.
JR: Is there any thought to doing something like Microsoft has done in healthcare – that is, to productize an enterprise-scale data management solution, Amalga – for life sciences?
Naimoli: Yes. I can’t really comment on that right now, and I’d let the Health Solutions Group talk about that directly with you.
JR: I’m going to guess it would be a similar offering in the sense of combining collaborative infrastructure, data repository, and visualization features, etc.
Naimoli: Yes, all of that. Amalga is a data integration platform and having that be specialized for the life sciences industry, but comments would definitely (have to come) from the Amalga team.
JR: What are your thoughts on the collision between electronic health records and electronic data capture (EDC) technology? Some see this as a key need for true translational medicine.
Naimoli: Well, it’s interesting you mention this. I’m working on a project with a major pharma around electronic health records integration, not so much with clinical data information, but with prescription information. We’re working closely with that organization to develop a patient adherence module that would allow the organization to properly intervene with patients to make sure they adhere to their prescription.
JR: What haven’t I asked that I should?
Naimoli: People often ask us about working in a regulated document management environment. Microsoft has been a content company for a long time, certainly with SharePoint server and the Office system comprise a platform upon which solutions can be developed. Documentum has had a definite stranglehold on the industry for a long time and we’ve come in and made a difference.
JR: Do you run into IBM and its Scoreproduct?
Naimoli: We don’t run into IBM’s Score that often. SharePoint is a server and platform and a content repository that can be validated. We can’t provide a validated solution ourselves obviously because only a sponsor can validate a solution, but we can provide guidance and, in fact, we do provide guidance on how to implement SharePoint in a validated environment.
JR: Thanks for your time, Mike.
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This article first appeared in Bio-IT World’s Predictive Biomedicine newsletter. Click here for a free subscription.