Health IT, Hospitals, Pharma

Hunger for data analytics integration drives IMS Health acquisition of marketing startup Appature

The deepening interest in healthcare data analytics to get a clearer view of how a […]

The deepening interest in healthcare data analytics to get a clearer view of how a company’s or product’s performance compares with rivals or the industry was a prominent trend at HIMSS this year. IMS Health’s acquisition of software-as-a-service startup, Appature, reflects the hunger healthcare marketers have for analytics that can help them better tailor their marketing campaigns to the desired audience more efficiently.

IMS said in a statement that it is adding Appature to enhance the reach of its own commercial platform that brings together third-party data with its own data for commercial planning, execution and analytical activities. Appature Nexus is described as a flexible and scalable cloud-based platform that reduces costs for clients and provides faster implementation and insight through big data integration, customer segmentation, multichannel marketing campaign execution, and real-time marketing reports and dashboards, according to the company statement.

“…life sciences companies are shifting their sales and marketing approaches to focus on an expanding set of decision makers and the explosion of new media, digital device and channel choices,” said Seyed Mortazavi, the president for IMS in the US, in the statement.

Appature was started in 2007 by CEO and co-founder Kabir Shahani who set up a relationship marketing platform to help users make more informed business decisions, according to its website.

CB Insights published a report with law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe last month that showed there were 49 big data M&A deals in the fourth quarter last year, the highest level since 2008.
CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal said in an emailed statement that it expects big data to continue to be a hot space for 2013, particularly for healthcare. “To some extent, the term itself is being neutered as everyone jumps on the bandwagon and tries to fit themselves under the umbrella of Big Data. But when you get past the marketing and hype, you see that certain verticals that are data heavy such as healthcare or financial services or advertising or retail will continue to have a voracious appetite for tools that help them make sense of the data. And so our expectation is that both financing and M&A activity relating to true Big Data companies will accelerate through the rest of the year.”

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