Wednesday, August 31, 2005

GSK IT outsourcing contract reflects trend

According to news "Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), announced today that it has been awarded an additional information technology (IT) outsourcing contract with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), valued at $100.5 million (€82 million) over five years. "
News of this latest agreement mirrors a deal which saw Pfizer recently set up shop in India, harnessing the country's strong IT resources to focus more on clinical trial and other R&D-related information management.
These deals proves that "India is swiftly being recognised by leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as a key cost-cutting benefit to be harnessed through outsourcing to India"
The pharmaceutical giant's planned expansion of outsourcing investments in India over the past few years has fallen in line with a wider trend that has seen leading international contract research organisations including multinationals such as Eli Lilly, Wyeth and Novo Nordisk outsource clinical trial activities to India as a means of slashing research costs.
The growth of informatics is mainly driven by a number of factors. The never-ending pressure to speed up drug R&D has forced pharma companies to rely on outside vendors for informatics solutions.
There has also been an exponential increase of data in which companies are now increasingly relying upon complex IT infrastructure to manage the growing amounts of data.
IBM Life Sciences and Sun Microsystems' Life Sciences are both predicting a rapid increase in scientific information in the near term. Already data is going from terabytes (a trillion) to petabytes (a quadrillion) sooner than in any other industry.
Because the computational requirements of proteomics are orders of magnitude greater than genomics, installation of architectures scaled to petabytes is predicted within the next two to three years.

The article sponsored by A-1 Technology Inc, dealing in software outsourcing and offshore software development.