Peter Benton sums up the Microsoft SharePoint thinking of many of the solution providers attending the annual DIA show in Washington, D.C. last week: "Eighty to ninety percent of everyone we talk to is either looking at it as a front-end dashboard or already has it," says the e-clinical division president at BioClinica in an interview.
"It's a business process management world," he adds, crediting the platform with capabilities important to all business users now, especially resource-constrained small biotechs.
Benton unveiled at DIA the BioClinica Integrated Operations Platform (BIOP), a version of its e-clinical technology suite that "leverages the power, the familiarity, and the ubiquity" of SharePoint, trumpets an announcement.
Benton says that among platform's benefits is the alternative it provides to the single-source, apps-inclusive enterprise-scale systems offered by companies like Oracle. SharePoint makes available the vertical expertise of many specialized vendors, including BioClinica. He says that although Oracle is currently a fixture in many big pharma companies, customers today are averse to buying everything from one vendor. Sister publication Fierce Content Management notes that SharePoint's big bang is the huge partner ecosystem that Microsoft has built around it.
BioClinica in March brought the Microsoft gold-certified Transenda into its fold, adding the Internet-based Office-Smart clinical trial management system and integration technologies. Besides positioning the company for last week's debut of BIOP, the acquisition broadened the company's potential customer base via the "ubiquitous" SharePoint platform.
- here's the BIOP release