The scope of the alliance will include worldwide joint marketing and collaborative selling to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, focusing initially on the developing e-clinical trials sector.
Through the partnership, companies will gain access to a highly customizable and scalable Web-based relationship management platform that links easily with Siebel Systems’ enterprise-wide technologies to support sales, marketing and customer service strategies and initiatives, with an emphasis on rapid deployment, reduced cost and proven performance and reliability. The integration of Siebel eBusiness Applications with the SoftWatch platform will enable powerful Internet-based solutions for healthcare, include e-marketing, personalization, customer analytics, e-sales force automation (eSFA) and e-service. The two organizations will provide dedicated engineering, product marketing and quality assurance teams to manage the integration of the two software products on a case-by-case basis, and create custom healthcare e-business solutions for clients.
A key focus of the partnership will be an e-clinical trial product offering that extends the ability of research sponsors to offer a more valuable experience for trial investigators and subjects. The e-clinical offering will be designed to help trial sponsors meet their clinical trial objectives by cultivating and managing relationships with all trial participants to facilitate recruitment, manage operational expenses and shorten the time to market of new products.
The average number of clinical trials is expected to quadruple in the next few years, as industry competition intensifies and pharmaceutical companies seek to strengthen their product pipelines, said Lyn Falconio, Vice President of Alliance Development at SoftWatch in a statement to the press. Siebel Systems shares our vision of helping healthcare companies position themselves for success by delivering customer-centric e-business solutions for collaborative communities to maximize the return on their research investments and beyond.
Harry Watkins, Director of CRM Research at The Aberdeen Group, said Health companies face a unique challenge in leveraging the Internet to manage relationships throughout the organization that extend from franchise to franchise, and across a wide range of customer touch points. The union of Siebel Systems’ enterprise-wide products and SoftWatch’s health-specific technology brings the industry one step closer to realizing the need for an integrated approach to e-CRM.
The partnership with Siebel Systems becomes a cornerstone of SoftWatch’s alliance strategy, to expand both nationally and globally through technology-sharing arrangements and sales channel opportunities. The second in a series of global partnerships for SoftWatch, this announcement follows the strategic relationship announced by SoftWatch and Computer Sciences Corporation in Europe, to co-market e-business products and services to multinational pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
