The vertical disintegration of pharmaceutical continues with reliance on external parties growing with declarations of "core business" determining the skills and capabilities that companies choose to keep in-house versus those that are outsourced. Chemical synthesis, biological screening, clinical trials activities have all seen increases in external activity. In the information technology space, this trend is manifest in seemingly endless "build versus buy" discussions. In cases where robust enterprise deployable and supportable software exists and can be provided to end-users under typical service level agreements with established and reputable vendors, the decision to buy under some typical vendor-client relationship or more elaborate strategic partnership schemes is straightforward. The buy decision is made easier for solutions that are fairly standard across the industry (e.g., clinical trial management, customer relationship management, finance, etc.). The scientific state-of-the-art and the associated processes are the early discovery and pre-clinical stages are quite variable and the demands on the supporting software require agility and responsive code modifications. In many of these situations, the decision to build is often made. Given that software development and ongoing support are more and more declared as not being core competencies, or desires, of most large pharmaceutical companies, partnerships with external software vendors under which software is co-created, supported, and often commercial are becoming more important. This talk will review tips and tricks for partner selection and relationship management.

Vendors are from Venus, clients are from Mars: How to build a successful partnership

251st National Meeting (2016)

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