IMS Health has made its third cloud-based acquisition in as many months, snapping up mobile sales and marketing systems provider 360 Vantage. The deal continues IMS' whirlwind push into the cloud that has also seen it snag Appature and Semantelli in the past few months.
Adding 360 Vantage to its takeover haul gives IMS a suite of cloud-based multichannel customer relationship management (CRM) tools and closed-loop marketing technologies. Salesforce.com underpins the suite, giving 360 Vantage a scalable platform from which to push its life sciences CRM platform. IMS will build the acquired assets into its commercial platform that combines its own data with sales information from third parties.
Combining 360 Vantage's analytics and reporting tools with IMS' data is expected to give users a better understanding of their customer interactions. This conversion of swaths of data into real insights is at the heart of IMS' motivation for making the deal. "For life sciences and healthcare companies today, the issue isn't a lack of information. The challenge is in connecting and managing it--and generating real, actionable insights for the business," Chris Nickum, president of Commercial Effectiveness Services for IMS Health, said in a release.
The tone is in keeping with other IMS takeovers in what has been a busy 12 months for the firm. Since the start of 2012, IMS has made 7 acquisitions, many of which have added new data, analytics capabilities or cloud-based systems to its arsenal. In the August takeover of TTC, for example, IMS talked up the analytics potential of combining its treatment outcomes insights with newly acquired cost data.
The past three deals--for 360 Vantage, Appature and Semantelli--have all been motivated by a desire to add new cloud capabilities. Appature, like 360 Vantage, is being incorporated into IMS' commercial platform, IMS One.
- here's the press release