Life Sciences

White Paper

The New Frontier for the Pharmaceutical

and Life Sciences Industry:
Real Big Value from Big Data

About the Author

Sangita Garg
Senior Consultant, Life Sciences
Sangita Garg is a Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) Solution
Architect with Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS') Life Sciences Technology Excellence
Group. She has more than 18 years of experience in the IT sector and is currently leading
Big Data initiatives for large pharmaceutical companies. Sangita has helped architect
large Data Warehouses for several global customers and managed large programs,
bringing innovation to the fore. Her expertise in DW and BI technologies has enriched
various engagements across multiple domains- manufacturing, cargo airlines,
investment banking, life sciences, and healthcare.
Sangita is an alumnus of National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, and holds a Master of
Technology in Heavy Electrical Equipment and Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical
Engineering.

Big Data, an 'in the news' technology, is gaining attention from organizations looking to seize
early entrant opportunities. It has become the talk of seminars, presentations, and
symposiums. The three 'V's, namely Volume, Variety, and Velocity, are the key characteristics
that are fundamental to its evolution. Current definitions qualify any data that is difficult to
manage using traditional systems as Big Data. Big Data has evolved from a bid to derive value
out of huge volumes of available unstructured data - overlooked until now because of the
existing systems' inability to process them.
Big Data has application opportunities across all value chains of the life sciences and
pharmaceutical industries. Adoption of Big Data in sales and marketing is gradually gaining
power primarily due to the underlying characteristics of the function that necessitates
interfacing through the web to listen to the 'voice of people'. Big Data has huge potential in
Research and Development (R&D) because of its intrinsic ability to process data from multiple
sources, such as millions of documents, protocols, study records, images, and applications;
and provide a unified view.
Like every nascent technology, Big Data adoption entails some challenges. In addition to
planning a significant investment in this evolving technology, collecting data elements lying
in organizational silos introduces a cultural challenge in Big Data initiatives. Recruiting and
retaining the right workforce with a balance of domain knowledge and Big Data skills is
another challenge organizations face today.
It is imperative for any organization to formulate a well-defined strategy for its Big Data
implementation to ensure alignment with its business objectives. Given that Big Data is still
in its early days, organizations looking to evaluate it can begin small by taking up proofs of
technology and factoring in multiple iterations. Recognizing the potential non-linear growth
Big Data can offer, some industry majors are acquiring lean Big Data startups.
This white paper attempts to provide a perspective to some fundamental questions
regarding Big Data, concerns and apprehensions, adoption challenges, and solutions to
understand the real value of Big Data. The paper also highlights certain Big Data prospects
that the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry can take advantage of.

Contents

Big Data - An Emerging Technology Paradigm

Are the three Vs sufficient to qualify Big Data?

Why Big Data?

Is social media the principal source for Big Data?

Big Data the CxOs perspective

Big Data Benefits across the life sciences industry value chain

Big Data Concerns to be addressed

11

Big Data Adoption challenges and solutions

12

Entering the Big Data arena Is it Easy?

12

Big Data Implementation Does it require a specialized skill set?

13

Big Data Technologies Making Choices

13

Is cost the only consideration for adoption?

13

Big Data Evolution The way forward for life sciences

and pharmaceutical industries

14

Conclusion

14

Acknowledgements

15

Big Data - An Emerging Technology Paradigm

Big Data technologies are designed to help handle extremely large and complex datasets that cannot be processed
using traditional systems. Initially, Big Data was leveraged to process the huge amounts of digital data made
available due to the unprecedented growth of social media. Since then, it has been used to process large complex
datasets that arise as a result of various scientific experiments, manufacturing processes, network logs, and so on. In
a very short time, Big Data has entered the technology arena and has established its presence across industry
verticals. Recognizing the real power of Big Data, organizations are now actively trying to leverage this technology
to derive business benefits and also, to not face a competitive disadvantage in the long run.

Are the 'three Vs' sufficient to qualify Big Data?

The three Vs Volume, Variety, Velocity - predominant characteristics of Big Data as initially defined by Gartner1
have now been universally accepted as the popular 3V Big Data model. Handling and storing large Volumes of data
is a daunting task. The petabytes and zetta bytes of data, infused into organizational systems from every possible
nook social media, RSS feeds or other digital devices, render querying data a challenge. Variety is another big
challenge for processing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to generate Big Data analytics. TCS' Big
Data Global Trend Study 20132 survey's combined results across all four regions of the world indicates that, on an
average, organizations dealt with - 51% structured, 27% unstructured and 21% semi-structured data. Big Data
brings with it the capabilities of analyzing data from the Velocity aspect. Companies have realized the immense
potential of analyzing near real-time data, which when augmented with data from the data warehouse, can aid
decision making.
The fourth dimension of Big Data is the Value it delivers. A few huge data sets that are generated inside and
outside enterprises have very little or no value. Despite meeting the three characteristics criteria Volume, Variety,
Velocity - these datasets do not qualify as Big Data. Identifying data sets that deliver the maximum value for any use
case, therefore, assumes prime importance in the qualification of Big Data.
e
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Velocity

VALUE
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Hig Real timtime)
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ANALYTICS

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Figure 1: Dimensions of Big Data

[1] Gartner, Hype Cycle for Big Data, July 2012
[2] TCS, The Emerging Big Returns on Big Data A TCS 2013 Global Trend Study, 2013, http://www.tcs.com/big-data-study/Pages/default.aspx

Why Big Data?

Technological growth and easy access to sophisticated gadgets have led to a digital data explosion. Complex data
generated by network traffic and collected from applications and process logs, outputs from numerous digital
devices, interactions on the web and social media sites, digital photographs, satellites, are common examples of Big
3
Data. According to a NASSCOM report , Big Data is projected to witness a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)
of 41% and will reach 35 zeta bytes between 2009 and 2020.
The cost of storing data has decreased with the evolution of storage technology. Organizations are no longer
apprehensive about storing huge data sets, but rather, expect to undertake advanced analytics on the Big Data
already captured in their systems. Companies recognize that they can generate better insights regarding their
customers and partners by using larger data sets. Data enriched from various sources with additional details, as
compared to what traditional systems offered, can deliver relevant, timely insights.
The life sciences industry is no exception to this revolution. Big Data is generated in the form of RFID and sensor
data from medical devices and pharmaceutical manufacturing organizations, raw data from various state-of-the-art
machines that process blood samples, tissues and so on. This large volume of data can be processed using a Big
Data platform to support scientific analytics.
Big Data has an edge over traditional counterpart technologies that entail expensive and dedicated hardware and
software. Cloud computing technology has relieved organizations of the liabilities of managing the huge IT
infrastructure necessary for implementing Big Data solutions while providing future scalability.

Is social media the principal source for Big Data?

The wide usage of social media in everyday life has made the world a close-knit circle. Social media opens up
myriad possibilities customers sharing early feedback on products post-launch, targeted promotion offers, social
networking and social pattern searches, and so on. Other sources of Big Data include websites, digital data sellers,
organizational data in the form of documents, images, email messages,
result datasets generated out of various experiments, and so on.
Companies with strong
Big Data finds numerous opportunities - integrating patients' electronic
employee focus have found
Big Data useful in
medical records data with that from social media data to draw insights
generating important
about their disease patterns and lifestyle. Pharmaceutical companies can
insights
for various HR
leverage this information to deliver more relevant, customized solutions to
functions by analyzing the
these payers.
blogs, websites, social
Using Big Data analytics, companies can gain access to insights generated
media sites, and so on that
have found popularity
atop an abundant repository of the 'voice of the people'. Acknowledging this
among their employees,
potential, life sciences and pharmaceutical companies are in the process of
and are shaping their HR
defining the payer-based business model over the traditionally used
policies accordingly.
provider-based model.

[3] NASSCOM, Big Data The Next Big thing, 2012, http://www.nasscom.in/big-data-next-big-thing

Social network analysis using Big Data technologies facilitates the identification of KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and
top influencers of a community. Using this intelligence, pharmaceutical companies can define strategies to address
this segment.

Big Data the CxO's perspective

Technology can only enter a wider arena if it is viable to CEOs. From a strategic perspective, CEOs consistently
aspire to improve relationships with their existing and prospective clientele. Advanced CRM Big Data analytics can
help them manage customer churn intelligently. Additionally, CxOs can gather market intelligence in real-time to
gain insights on their competitor base by analyzing real world data efficiently, empowering them to make informed
business decisions.
The top priority for pharmaceutical and life sciences companies is to improve the quality of human health and wellbeing. Big Data helps achieve this priority by leveraging innovative techniques to enhance productivity in R&D, and
reducing the cycle time for drug development and delivering them to the correct market and customer segments.
Optimized product and process improvement is important to CxOs. In particular, for the pharmaceutical
manufacturing sector, Big Data analytics can be used to generate deeper insights to identify process bottlenecks
and improve operational efficiency. Big Data enables multi-dimensional analysis to determine the performance of a
particular drug. This input can be used to build various strategies to enhance the performance of that drug and
quality of associated services and products.
Acquiring and retaining the right talent pool is a major challenge for CEOs and a determining factor for an
organizations' steady growth in a competitive market. Big Data analytics can identify appropriate profiles from the
innumerous digital portals in a cost effective and timely manner. Big Data analytics can also help retain the right
talent pool. By analyzing the 'voice of employees' expressed through social media, both inside and outside the
organization, companies can take proactive measures to address employee concerns or implement employee
friendly policies.

Big Data Benefits across the life sciences industry

value chain
Big Data presents innumerable
The pharmaceutical industry is witnessing a decline in the growth rate of
new drugs in the pipeline. With drug patents reaching their expiry period, it
has become imperative for pharmaceutical companies to identify new
avenues of growth. Large companies are cutting down their operational
costs by reducing headcount and closing down less productive plants in a
bid to improve margins.
We detail a few use cases indicative of this:

opportunities to overcome
organizational challengesexorbitant R&D costs,
complex analytics processing
capabilities, and gaining
valuable insights from real
world data across the various
life sciences and
pharmaceutical segments.

Disease pattern analysis Big Data can help analyze disease patterns across geographies, based on multiple
factors that contribute to the occurrence of a particular disease. Researchers can benefit from information about
trends or changing disease patterns over time and more importantly, about location shifts in disease patterns.
Pattern analysis can be further extended to various types of epidemic spreads in plants and animals. Epidemic early
warning systems can provide powerful insights about disease spread, which can help in undertaking
comprehensive eradication measures.
Drug discovery Big Data enables advanced search capabilities for analyzing millions of scientific publications,
patents, diseases, and clinical trials documents. This helps bio-researchers discover potential areas for target drugs.
Big Data also accelerates drug discovery by identifying target molecules in less time and in a cost effective manner.
Efficient and timely analysis of molecular imaging data for early detection of disorder or disease one of the
greatest challenges for researchers and scientists in today's world, has now become possible with the advent of Big
Data solutions.
Clinical trials management Big Data can help in the various steps involved in clinical trials - patient profiling by
identifying the right candidates through analytics of demographic information and historical data, evaluating drug
readiness, reviewing previous clinical trial events, intervention through correct drug dosage, and remote patient
monitoring. It even helps identify the possible adverse and undesirable effects of a new drug even before they are
reported.
Large scale genome sequencing The cost of generating raw data has
declined with the use of new technology and more advanced algorithms in
the area of bio-informatics. This necessitates using specific data points to
develop better statistical models for understanding the cause of disease and
identifying candidates for new drug trials. For example, in the near future,
treatments for various forms of cancer will involve not only sequencing of an
individual's diseased and healthy genomes but also quantification of
differentially expressed genes to identify the right course of chemotherapy.
Using the present set of technologies, processing of sequence data remains
a significant bottleneck, since a large number of computations using
several resource-intensive algorithms need to be carried out.
Pharmaceutical industry majors anticipate that the number of such samples
to be analyzed will scale up to hundreds in the next couple of years. Big Data
has immense potential to perform computations of large-scale genomics in
a timely and cost-effective manner.

A proof of technology for

performance enhancement of
the Ribonucleic Acid (RNA)
sequencing process using Big
Data was conducted. Currently,
even a single medium-size
sample of RNA sequence
requires 3-4 days of processing
time before it reaches the
analysts' table. The proof of
technology on Big Data
established that processing
cycle time can be reduced and
cost-effective scalability
provided as per number
of samples.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing and engineering systems This industry segment has started adopting Big Data
in multiple drug manufacturing processes such as analysis of process deviation between drug recipe creation and
drug recipe execution. Moreover, initiatives are being taken to develop recipe models leveraging Big Data. Today,
pharmaceutical manufacturers find it difficult to quickly establish batch genealogy and its traceability to meet
regulatory compliance. Big Data technologies, with their fast computation capabilities, can quickly establish the
link between the finished product and all the input materials and processes. Companies can then take corrective
actions and analyze shop-floor activities for process deviation and improvement using Big Data.
Supply chain management and logistics Companies are increasingly adopting demand-based supply systems.
Core systems of demand management are based on forecasting systems that generate advanced analytics. Big Data
analytics can be leveraged to generate complex statistical models for insights into customer adoption patterns.
Moreover, Big Data finds its use in generating vendor profiles of potential suppliers which is an important
parameter for generating minimum lead time from order to delivery. Big Data analytics can be used to monitor
product shipments, identifying where inventory is disappearing, as well as spikes in logistics costs.
Sales and marketing Big Data finds its usefulness in a multitude of operations - analyzing unstructured data
from patients' queries and healthcare professionals' responses on the web, challenging market conditions, and
customer and product targeting and segmentation. Moreover, the need of the hour for any pharmaceutical
company is to meet patients' personalized requirements rather than continuing with a generic product. Big Data
analytics equips pharmaceutical companies with the information pertaining to individual lifestyle traits of both
health care practitioners as well as patients. Key opinion management programs can, subsequently, be designed
based on insights drawn from Big Data analytics.
Big Data analytics of real world data can be used to disseminate relevant product information such as drug efficacy,
adverse effects, and so on to health care providers and payers to build brand awareness and enhance product
loyalty. This also helps understand to whom to cross-sell or up-sell products. Big Data also facilitates brand analysis
of a pharmaceutical company and determines the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and channel.
Big Data plays a vital role in sales-force effectiveness through efficient and optimized call planning for targeted
healthcare professionals, preparing customized compensation plans for field sales-force, and customized product
campaigns and offerings based on the region and segment of patients. Big Data can be further leveraged to
manage the churn of healthcare professionals.
Patient care quality and program analysis Big Data can help organizations source and manage complaints
data, feedback data from multiple sources such as external blog posts, social media sites, data feeds from external
vendors, and providers' internal systems. The data collected can be further enriched by filtering pertinent data in
Big Data platforms into refined versions to generate unified insights about patients' managed healthcare programs.
Healthcare providers can then analyze the insights in a holistic manner to form policies and build strategies that
drive better patient care and quality managed healthcare programs.
Serving human lives through Big Data analytics Big Data technology has the potential to deliver value across
various aspects of human lives. With tremendous analytics and search capabilities, Big Data has found usage in
applications related to forensic science. Leveraging its search capabilities, evidence based documents of various
events can be searched and data from connected devices analyzed to identify patterns that can aid investigations.
9

For instance, in neonatal healthcare, Big Data enables the capturing of extensive data streams from devices
connected to un-well babies; vital parameters can then be captured, monitored and analyzed in real time to
provide a comprehensive view of the babies' health. Health practitioners are able to identify disease symptoms and
take precautionary measures well in advance.
Call center data analytics Call centers of large pharmaceutical companies generate huge datasets -straight from
the customers, often in their native language. This data contains plenty of useful information such as customers'
preferences, call center representatives' responses, and product, process, and service quality. Big Data provides
opportunities to enhance the quality of call centers by generating insights on the companies' processes, people,
and products.
Data archival solution for long periods Big Data is proving its ability to complement large pharmaceutical data
warehouses by delivering 'warm storage', i.e. storage that supports rapid data access and retrieval, capability. The
solution entails harnessing data from recent years across data warehouses for decision support while historical data
may be kept on the Big Data platform, utilizing low cost storage capabilities. This way the operating data
warehouse is relieved from storing historical data, which in turn improves its performance. The historical data, part
of warm storage on the Big Data platform, can be retrieved in less time.

CRM

Internal
Data

Third Party data

Social Media
Real World
data

Emails

Documents

E
X
T
R
A
C
T

Enterprise
Data
Warehouse

User Experience
Data
Mart

Data as active storage

Traditional data
Data at Aggregate level
Data for performance metrics

Trend & pattern analytics

&
CUBE

T
R
A
N
S
F
O
R
M

Big Data
Cluster
Data Stored in granular level
Data as warm storage
Data for Big data analytics
Storage for textual data
Cost effective scalability
Structured data to Data Warehouse

Mobile devices

Mobile devices

Xml,
CSV
files

Downstream applications

Reporting applications

Sensor Devices
& RFID

Figure 2: An overview of how Big Data and data warehouses complement each other

10

Big Data Concerns to be addressed

The influx of any new technology brings with it a set of concerns and apprehensions. This also holds true for Big
Data. Although Big Data has been able to establish acceptance among its adopter community, a logical step
towards the management of technology concerns will lead to increased growth.
Is Big Data capable of solving existing data management problems? Big Data's initial adoption faces a rather
demanding criterion - with all that Big Data promises, will it be the single answer to a wide spectrum of problems
related to data management.
With Big Data's capability of managing a wide variety of structured and unstructured data, handling huge data
volumes from terabytes to zetta bytes and processing near real time data, it can uncover intelligent and currently
obscured insights. Moreover, the Big Data ecosystem can coexist with and complement the existing IT architecture
and infrastructure.
Is Big Data just another technology trend? Aligning current technology trends with business objectives to
ensure a high Return on Investment is vital to survive. The evolution of Big Data brings with it a repertoire of
technology solutions for managing data, storing large scale data, integrating a variety of data formats, enriching
data by adding context and finally generating insights and analytics.
Big Data has found purpose in brand management and sales improvement of healthcare pharmacies, by delivering
a 360 degree view of customers. Researchers and scientists can leverage Big Data for the early detection of diseases
to undertake preventive measures and recommend treatment in the event of an epidemic.
With the volumes of data readily available to organizations, Big Data's superior processing abilities will find favor
among the industry leaders looking to leverage insights to derive business value.
Will Big Data uniquely exist in times to come? The rise of globalization, networking, and social media has shrunk
the world to a small colony; implicitly lessening the uniqueness time span for any technology trend.
Enterprises today define data management strategies to cover all their data elements. In current times, Big Data
strategies are defined independent of the enterprise's data management strategy. However, in the long run,
organizations may gradually choose to have a single enterprise wide data management strategy which includes Big
Data in conjunction with other data elements. This comprehensive strategy will provide organizations a strategic
and holistic view of their entire set of data elements.
What does the future hold for Big Data? The recent hype around Big Data predicts that it will penetrate
organizational layers, influencing the way of working of organizations. The life sciences industry will observe radical
changes in the managing of data from sensors and logs, result sets of experiments, and consumers' and providers'
feedback. The success of any Big Data implementation depends on the accuracy and relevance of the data points
that have been collected. These data points should be further enriched with the already available internal data to
derive analytics that supports precise and meaningful business decision making.

11

Data Access
Data Storage

Data
Enrichment

Data
Insight

Relational
(Structured)

Discover
Value

(Reports & Analytics)

Non-Relational
(Semi-Structured
Unstructured)

Associate(+)
Context

Streaming
(Real Time, Video,
Near Real Time)

Refine
(Filter)

Self Service

Complementary
Downstream
Applications
Data on & for
Devices

Figure 3: Big Data lifecycle

Big Data Adoption challenges and solutions

Enterprises are encumbered by certain challenges in their Big Data adoption journey. Some of these challenges are:
n

Inhibition in making the first move for a particular use case

Reluctance towards making Big Data strategy investment in the current financial year

Absence of any single Big Data vendor

Integration of already available traditional data with Big Data

Scarcity of combined Big Data and domain skills

Our research indicates that the biggest challenges while deriving business value from Big Data are as much cultural
as technological.
It is imperative for organizations experimenting with Big Data to have a thought-through enterprise-wide data
strategy, which caters to the integration of Big Data with already existing traditional data.

Entering the Big Data arena Is it Easy?

From big vendors to small boutique firms, organizations are identifying lists of Big Data capabilities and offerings
that they provide. Technology giants have made significant investments in software, infrastructure and R&D,
foreseeing the tremendous opportunities that the Big Data future holds. Numerous lean startups are offering niche
and customized Big Data solutions.

12

Our recommended approach to adopting Big Data is to start slow, realize benefits, pause, think and take the next
step, and reap subsequent benefits. The pharmaceutical industry can identify use cases to conduct pilots, especially
in the areas of sales and marketing, to establish a sense of confidence in technology and then move on to take on
more complex use cases.

Big Data Implementation Does it require a specialized skill set?

It is imperative for organizations implementing Big Data projects, to understand the importance of the special skills
required. Since Big Data is not a single technology, skills relevant to it cannot be acquired in silos or through
traditional training methods. Organizations implementing Big Data initiatives will require the expertise of data
scientists, system analysts, infrastructure analysts, domain experts, technology implementers, solution architects,
data integrators, reporting and analytics experts and software developers among others.
An organization taking up a Big Data implementation can adopt a step-wise approach for acquiring Big Data skills.
As a first step, organizations should establish enterprise-wide awareness about Big Data and its capabilities. Data
scientists, system analysts and domain experts can then work towards defining the problem statement and
corresponding solution. Technology implementers, data integrators, reporting and analytics experts can then
implement custom Big Data solutions. The Big Data solution architect presents the integrated view of the problem
statement.

Big Data Technologies Making Choices

Although we have presented a variety of use cases, their relevance, impact and potential business value change
based on each organization's context and maturity. Factors that influence the Big Data adoption decision to
determine its success include the current environment of the organization, relevant data sources to be accessed
and the insights needed.
Organizations must opt for Big Data tools/technology based on the type of data sources a high-performance
message delivery data system, or data in motion, or static data as well as the threshold on infrastructure costs and
performance benchmarks.
Exhaustive due diligence for vendor and tools selection should be carried out. It is extremely important to verify the
fitment of Big Data in the existing enterprise IT landscape.

Is cost the only consideration for adoption?

In a turbulent economy, businesses need to justify the cost involved in embracing any new technology platform
vis--vis its ROI. Innovation can be sustained if it harmonizes capability and cost. The cost consideration to adopt
new technology depends on various factors such as implementation cost, maintenance cost, skills availability, and
upgradability, all of which businesses need to evaluate within the current system. If the cost factors of a technology
changeover are identical to those of the existing technology, then questions arise regarding its cultural acceptance.

13

While on the subject of Big Data solutions and their cost effectiveness, the market is still evaluating both Hadoop
solutions and non Hadoop solutions. A Hadoop ecosystem utilizes massive parallel processing computing
techniques using just commodity grade desktop machines. This capability of the Hadoop platform overcomes the
challenge of optimum performance in a cost-effective manner and has been proven to be highly scalable. NonHadoop solutions are largely customized solutions for addressing specific and specialized requirements.
Cost consideration has also taken a step back for use cases where the requirement is to process near real-time data
to be able to generate more advanced analytics.

Big Data Evolution The way forward for life sciences and pharmaceutical
industries
Pharmaceutical companies want to realize near term high value from Big Data implementation projects with a
small preliminary investment. Most of them are inhibited in Big Data adoption strategies due to the stringent
regulatory bodies governing this industry. The lack of skilled IT resources imposes additional challenges in its
adoption.
The Big Data revolution, however, promises to open up myriad opportunities in diverse quarters. Some
pharmaceutical giants have realized the potential benefits Big Data has to offer and have planned budgets around
it. Companies can start to explore Big Data in sales and marketing, R&D, and clinical trials functions to establish
gains and subsequently venture into other areas of the pharmaceutical value chain.
Medical device companies are also formulating strategies to include Big Data investments in their annual plan.
Analysis of large volumes of unstructured digital data from numerous imaging/screening/sensor instruments has
provided a foothold for Big Data. Similarly, Big Data has also taken its first step in bioinformatics for exploring
genomics area.

Conclusion
With the hype generated by Big Data in recent times, it is slowly becoming a part of the growth strategy for most
enterprises. Due to limited technology competency and stringent regional laws, however, Big Data is yet to see
large scale adoption. Although Big Data initially aimed at countering the challenge of handling the large tidal wave
of social media, there also lie huge data sets within enterprises that have the potential to deliver insights.
Big Data skills cannot be acquired in silos - they require a much broader and deeper sense of understanding and a
holistic approach to problem solution. It is imperative for us to study the current environment of organizations,
data sources to be accessed, and the type of insights expected.
Today, the share of combined unstructured and semi structured data used in pharmaceutical companies is
marginally less than structured data; however, this share will see a steep rise in years to come with the exponential
growth of unstructured data.

14

Pharmaceutical and life sciences companies stand to gain by using Big Data technologies across the value chain for
disease pattern analysis, drug discovery, clinical trials management, large scale genome sequencing,
pharmaceutical manufacturing and engineering systems, supply chain management and logistics, sales and
marketing, patient care quality and program analysis and call center data analytics.
Big Data technologies have the capability to closely fit in the current IT landscape and even complement existing
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing practices.
Cost considerations have been set aside for use cases where organizations find business value through the
implementation.
A methodical and stepwise approach is needed for Big Data initiatives; exhaustive due diligence for vendor and
tool selection is required to derive maximum benefits. Due to various reasons, the pharmaceutical industry has
exercised caution in the adoption of Big Data. However, a well-defined strategy for adopting the new technology
paradigm will ensure this industry also harvests the huge potential Big Data promises to unlock.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Nitin Kumar, Head Life Sciences Technology Excellence Group, TCS, for his
contribution to the paper.

15

About TCS Life Sciences

Top Global Life Sciences organizations derive value from TCS' full services play in IT, Consulting, KPO,
Infrastructure and Engineering Services as well as new age business solutions including Mobility
and Big Data. TCS' rich industry experience, domain expertise and global footprint ensures that it
partners with its Life Sciences customers to help them advance clinical trial efficiencies, accelerate
drug discovery, maximize manufacturing productivity and improve sales and marketing
effectiveness. In addition, TCS has a dedicated Life Sciences Innovation Lab which ensures that its
customers have the tools and innovative solutions they need to solve complex business challenges.

Contact
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