Trinity Pharma, now Shyft Analytics, bids for more enterprise-level analytics business

Analytics tailored to the specific needs of biopharma organizations has become a hotly competitive arena for IT firms and consulting organizations as the desire both to track progress in clinical trials and to keep a finger on the pulse of the commercial market deepens. The flood of data pouring out of electronic health records (EHR) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, multichannel marketing and other broad-reaching data systems threatens to overwhelm pharma IT departments; the complaint heard among pharma business managers is that there is no lack of data, but an inability to draw intelligence from the data being received.

Trinity Pharma (Waltham, MA), having raised $19 million in private-equity funding during 2014, has renamed itself as Shyft Analystics and repackaged its software as the Shyft Enterprise Cloud Analytics Platform. It has two parts, according to Brian Irwin, VP of business strategy: Shyft Data—the company’s ability to blend data from diverse sources (both syndicated market data and data generated internally by a company’s CRM and other systems); and Shyft Analytics—a platform to provide “guided analytics” in near real time and across desktop and mobile platforms. As Trinity Pharma, the company has been doing this data matching and cleansing for over a decade; now, with its software migrated to the cloud, and with code written in HTML5, the company expects to win more business from more parts of pharma organizations. The Shyft platform has “out of the box” solutions for specialty pharma, launch, real world evidence, market access, rare disease product management and sales, according to the company, and other applications can be built to order for clients.

As Shyft, and companies like it, encompass more data services and business functions, they start running into each other in the marketplace, which will make for a competitive but confusing set of solutions. One way to characterize these enterprise-analytics solutions is by their “point of origin,” so to speak—what their services originally were targeted for. In Shyft’s case, that seems to be in multichannel and closed-loop marketing; for Reltio, another new entrant, it is master data management. IMS Health, which has just taken the wraps off its merging of Cegedim Relationship Management into a common suite of services, is offering Nexus for marketing data, and the Customer Engagement Hub for enterprise analytics. Veeva, best known for its cloud-based sales-force automation platforms, is now touting its Commercial Cloud for enterprise-level analytics. In each case, though, the emphasis is on building out from those points of origin to offer a full slate of data services.