Yet another powerful force in customer intelligence in the coming years will be the pharmaceutical industry. Companies in the sector are expected to invest more than $2 billion in business intelligence solutions overall by 2006, according to a new report by Gantry Group.

While analysis of the industry tends to focus on the drug development pipeline, success in the coming years may increasingly revolve around integrating sales and marketing information with customer-focused insight to rapidly adjust priorities and investments. BI portals, for instance, are enabling companies to generate “real-time views of investments and paybacks, across brands, therapies and customer segments,” according to Gantry.

At the same time, the proliferation of pharmaceutical informatics – from Pharmacy Benefits Managers, pharmacies, health care payers and data providers – is enabling pharmas to gain a better understanding of sales, prescription, usage and payment trends to drive smarter corporate decisions. “Sophisticated pharmas have figured out that they need a broader population-based view of the context within which their drugs are used,” says Daniel W. Paterson, VP of marketing and corporate development at PharMetrics, Inc., an informatics firm. “To be truly effective the view must translate over to the sales side…”