VBioPharma is the Industry’s First onDemand CRM Application

PLEASANTON, Calif.--Verticals onDemand, a leading provider of industry-specific onDemand CRM solutions delivered on the Salesforce Platform, announced today that its first product suite will be tailored for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. VBioPharma ushers in the era of onDemand software for this currently underserved industry segment.

“I have been building and selling sales automation systems to pharmaceutical companies for over twenty years,” Mark Armenante, Co-Chairman of Verticals onDemand, stated. “With both traditional industry players being recently acquired and the world moving quickly to the onDemand model, the opportunity has never been so great to rapidly create the next CRM industry standard. And the opportunity to do it on the world’s leading on-demand platform from salesforce.com almost guarantees success.”

Verticals onDemand has brought together some of the most experienced life sciences CRM professionals to build the first onDemand CRM applications specifically tailored to the needs of biopharmaceutical sales, service, and marketing professionals. VBioPharma is built on the Salesforce Platform, the world’s first multitenant, on-demand platform, enabling all the benefits achieved by tens of thousands of salesforce.com customers around the world. This means VBioPharma customers will face no upfront costs, install no software, and install no server hardware. The cost of software upgrades has been eliminated, liberating life sciences companies from the costly upgrade cycles that limit flexibility and innovation. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can now pay for just what they need as their CRM systems grow along with them.

"Due to their very specific requirements, complex selling models and global scope, biopharmaceutical companies have found limited appeal in the move towards Software as a Service (SaaS)," explained Dale Hagemeyer, Research Vice President at Gartner. "As these companies continue to drive efficiencies ahead of major patent expirations, they will turn more and more to the SaaS model as a way to save cost – once it has been proven to meet their requirements."

VBioPharma is the first integrated suite of sales, marketing, and service applications for global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies delivered through an onDemand platform. Starting with a comprehensive biopharma-specific data model, VBioPharma will deliver the functionality that biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies need most, including:

• Selling functionality for managed care, specialty care, and primary care sales forces
• Call reporting, PDMA-compliant sampling, and signature capture on mobile phones and tablet PCs
• Aggregate spend, expense capture, and state compliance reporting
• Closed loop marketing and campaign management
• Medical information request and patient reimbursement support
• Rep, manager, and home office analytics

In addition to delivering full functionality across sales, marketing, and service, Verticals onDemand is also forging unique partnerships with leading data providers in the pharmaceutical industry. Using modern web-services technologies, the reference, affiliations, and formulary data in VBioPharma will be kept up to date on a daily basis with zero manual effort. These relationships will further speed customers’ time to value while dramatically reducing the complexity associated with data integration.

“Pharmaceutical companies are used to measuring CRM projects in months and years while spending seven, eight, and even nine figure budgets. With today’s latest technologies, there is a better way,” explained Matt Wallach, Vice President of Marketing & Sales. “I am thrilled to be partnering with salesforce.com to help deliver the vast benefits of onDemand CRM applications to the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.”

VBioPharma is priced on a per user per month basis. General availability is planned for Q2 2007.

About Verticals onDemand

Verticals onDemand leverages the Salesforce Platform to deliver onDemand customer relationship management (CRM) solutions for specific industry segments. Founded by software industry veterans, the company combines deep industry domain expertise, CRM deployment experience, and Software as a Service (SaaS) operations savvy with the Salesforce Platform, the world’s first multitenant, on-demand platform. With an initial focus on the life sciences industry, Verticals onDemand customers will achieve the fastest time to value through the deployment of fully functional CRM applications that are simple to deploy, inexpensive to operate, and provide a superior user experience.

Verticals onDemand is a privately-held company headquartered in Pleasanton, CA. For more information, visit www.verticalsondemand.com.