Veeva, Cegedim announce new partnerships and IT alliances in pharma sales force automation

No surprise that the head-to-head competition in sales force automation between Veeva Systems (Pleasanton, CA) and Cegedim Relationship Management (Bedminster, NJ)—now a business unit of IMS Health—has continued into 2015. In Cegedim’s case, Publicis Touchpoint Solutions (Yardley, PA), a leading contract-sales organization (CSO), has announced a “strategic relationship” with Cegedim that will place Mobile Intelligence (MI), Cegedim’s flagship CRM (customer relationship management) system, as its platform of choice for deployment to its field forces. While Veeva’s system was one of the first to “go to the cloud,” at least for biopharma clients, Cegedim’s MI was the first that worked on both the iPad and Microsoft-powered tablets (which Veeva’s do as well). In the past, Touchpoint has noted that it was the first pharma CSO to adopt Veeva’s platform; but it, and most other leading CSOs, will use either system or a client’s preferred platform if so desired by the client.

Meanwhile, Veeva announced a key partnership in Europe with BMI System (Montrouge, France), which markets the NAYA Transparency solution for tabulating pharma spending and related compliance issues with healthcare providers. NAYA will be integrated with Veeva Network Customer Master software, its solution for customer master data management (MDM). MDM is critical to accurate spend reporting in order to properly attribute spending to specific health care professionals (HCP) or healthcare organizations.

Like the Physician Payments Sunshine Act and its aggregate spending rules in the US, Europe is moving, country-by-country, to an agg spending regulatory framework. While the US’ is mandatory, Europe’s started with the voluntary reporting guideline issued by EFPIA, a pan-European pharma trade association. Various countries (leading with France) are putting the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) guidance into their national healthcare regulations, or using it as a model; ultimately, industry sources indicate, most of Europe will have an agg spending requirement. “A complete, clean customer master is the prerequisite for accurate spend reporting, but it’s often the missing part of the equation,” said Guillaume Roussel, director of strategy for Veeva Network in Europe, in a statement. “Bringing Veeva Network Customer Master together with BMI System’s NAYA solution together greatly accelerates our customers’ ability to meet EFPIA requirements through seamless implementation, saving them from developing costly and laborious custom-built systems.”

Earlier, in December, Cegedim announced another IT partnership of its own, with Aktana, a San Francisco developer of software for life sciences marketing, to provide “real time, in-context and in-workflow decision-making support” for field sales reps. “By partnering with Cegedim, we’re able to enhance the entire sales process from strategy mapping to on-the-ground daily decisions, and deliver it through a platform the customer already knows, uses daily and trusts,” said Derek Choy, co-founder and vice president of products at Aktana.

“As data insights become increasingly important to interactions with healthcare professionals, said Laurent Labrune, Cegedim’s CEO, “Aktana’s Decision Support Engine helps commercial teams to take the next best action faster—enabling enterprises to better realize their business goals directly from Mobile Intelligence.”