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| Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif |
Celgene ($CELG) has expanded its deal with Medidata ($MDSO). Having primarily tapped Medidata for its Rave electronic data capture (EDC) system over the course of their 8-year relationship, Celgene has now secured itself access to a handful of other pieces of software.
The deal sees Celgene pick the Medidata Clinical Cloud as the technology platform that connects its clinical trials. In doing so, Celgene has moved beyond Rave, the cornerstone of Medidata's business, by adding some of the eClinical specialist's latest products. Celgene will now use Medidata tools for study and protocol design, site budgeting and planning, safety reporting, clinical trial management, site quality management and electronic patient-reported outcomes, while continuing to rely on Rave for its EDC requirements.
In transitioning from Rave to a platform of products, Celgene has moved along a path that Medidata has been working to get clients to follow for years, with some success. "To date, all of our large platform customers, including our first in 2012, and today, Celgene, started as Rave single-study customers," Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif said on a conference call to discuss the company's fourth-quarter results. News of the deal with Celgene follows shortly after the unveiling of a similar alliance with Boehringer Ingelheim, a firm that used to work closely with Medidata's rival Oracle ($ORCL).
Boehringer and Celgene are now among the 67% of Medidata customers that source two or more products from the company. In 2014, fewer than 60% of customers were on multi-product deals. In parallel to the upselling of existing customers, Medidata has been working to bring on new clients, resulting in more than 200 additional businesses signing up to work with it last year. The goal is to convert new, small customers into buyers of multiple products, a process that will need to succeed if Medidata is to hit its long-term target of growing by 20-25% a year.
Medidata is predicting it will fall just short of the goal this year, with the midpoint of the $450 million to $474 million it expects to pull in representing sales growth of 18%, around what it achieved in 2015. With last year's sales growth being held back by a fourth quarter that fell short of the Street's expectations and forecasts for 2016 coming in below analyst forecasts, too, Medidata saw its stock drop 10% on the day it released the results.
- read the Celgene news
- here's the financial results
- and the call transcript