Oracle Acquires Phase Forward

By Ruchi Mallya

Oracle recently announced that it has agreed to acquire Phase Forward, a provider of e-clinical and drug safety solutions. With this merger, Oracle will significantly bolster its Health Sciences Suite with tools that will enable researchers, clinical trial specialists, healthcare providers, regulators, and patients to more effectively and securely capture, contribute, access, and share data.

With a strong footprint already in the e-clinical and drug safety solution space, the Phase Forward acquisition will likely secure Oracle's position as the leading provider of mission-critical applications to the life sciences industry.

Oracle will offer an end-to-end e-clinical and drug safety product suite

Through its Integrated Clinical Research Suite, Phase Forward allows life sciences companies to automate and integrate the management of their clinical development process from Phase I trials through regulatory submission, Phase IV trials, and pharmacovigilance. While there are some overlaps between Phase Forward's offerings and Oracle's existing clinical and drug safety solutions, several gaps will be filled.

With Phase Forward comes LabPass, an application that helps improve efficiencies specifically in Phase I trials – an area that often gets overlooked in e-clinical technology evaluation. In addition, Oracle will benefit from the integration of OutcomeLogix, a solution designed for electronic patient reported outcomes (ePRO) and late-phase trials. ePRO adoption is increasing as trials become larger and longer, so this application will be a big plus for Oracle.

Phase Forward will also bring its Clinical Development Center, which is an environment that integrates all clinical data into one central location and provides a solution to automate and manage statistical analysis, reporting, and submission processes. Although there are some overlaps with Oracle's Life Sciences Hub and CDA solution, Oracle has shown great aptitude in integrating acquisitions and in bringing their products successfully into an integrated and coherent future platform strategy.

Phase Forward offers solutions in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which will open up a new customer base of smaller life sciences companies that may have traditionally found it fiscally challenging to gain access to Oracle products.

Oracle needs to clarify the roadmap to avoid ambiguity for end users

Since both Oracle and Phase Forward are leading providers in the e-clinical and safety space, there are bound to be some overlaps in their offerings. These include their electronic data capture (EDC) solutions, clinical trials management systems (CTMSs), and drug safety technologies. Customers of both are likely to feel some anxiety as to what will happen with their existing solutions. Some who are currently evaluating e-clinical and safety solutions may also wait to see what the merger brings.

In the past, Oracle has adopted its Oracle Applications Unlimited strategy, which has worked with all previous application acquisitions and there is no reason to believe that it will be different with this deal.

Ovum is confident that Oracle will take an approach that is most beneficial for its customers and will likely define a roadmap in its initial calls that should quickly remove ambiguity. Due to Phase Forward's success and large customer base, Ovum is cautiously optimistic that the combination of the two vendors' product sets will result in a tier-1, end-to-end e-clinical and safety suite that will cater to all types and sizes of company in the life sciences industry.

Oracle makes it clear that it has a huge stake in the life sciences industry

If there was any doubt before about Oracle's commitment to the life sciences industry, it should all be removed now. With the Relsys acquisition in 2009 and the pending transaction with Phase Forward, Oracle has made it clear that it is serious about its promise to help the healthcare and life sciences industries focus on improving patients' health and medical outcomes.

The acquisition of Phase Forward will allow Oracle to provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution suite that goes across the pharma lifecycle. Ovum expects that this is just the tip of the iceberg, with much more to come from Oracle as it continues to invest in its Health Sciences Suite.

Ruchi Mallya is available for comment. To arrange an interview, please contact Alicia Barrios in the Datamonitor press office at +1 570 687 9319 or send an email to us_pr@datamonitor.com.

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SOURCE: Oracle