Verify Brand re-enters life-sciences serialization market with dedicated software offering

Verify Brand (Minneapolis) is no Johnny-come-lately to the serialization/track-and-trace battlefield in life sciences; the company was actually founded (in 2003) in the business, but left it as a matter of survival after the California e-pedigree rules were postponed in 2008. Now, the company is seeing renewed interest among pharma companies, especially those meeting the evolving serialization rules in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere. This month it took the wraps off VB Enterprise 4.0 for Life Sciences, and coincidentally hired Scott Pugh as director of strategic business development away from Accenture’s life sciences practice.

According Pugh, VB 4.0 is roughly comparable to the enterprise-level data or event-information systems from Axway, IBM or SAP. Verify Brand has rejoined the GS1 organization, and is in the process of getting VB 4.0 certified as EPCIS-compliant. Where Verify hopes to compete against those companies, he says, is in managing the data collection so that the data are tailored to being a “traceability repository” rather than the more conventional “event repository” that is supposed to make track-and-trace data available to trading partners or regulators. “A huge amount of data must be collected and integrated for EPCIS to be effective, and VB 4.0 brings more tools to this problem,” he says.

Verify Brand’s technology has been deployed in global applications outside life sciences; for example, the company’s technology manages the global processes around serializing and authenticating the printer cartridge business of Lexmark (among about 10 other clients). Kevin Erdman, company president, says that the confidence level is rising among pharma prospects that serialization projects will be going forward, regardless of how the push for federal legislation plays out. The company has also partnered with several companies who have substantial operations in life sciences, including marking-equipment vendor Videojet, label converter CCL Label, systems integrator Optel Vision, and the security services unit of 3M.