Today pharmaceutical companies are faced with massive commercial pressures to innovate. Health services are now requiring new cures for new diseases.
Drug development is a costly business which carries a huge risk of failure.
Phamaceutical companies are finding that information technology can act as a way of reducing technology costs and minimising their risk. At GlaxoWellcome, the pharmaceutical giant formed by the merger of Glaxo and Wellcome, an Intranet system is providing a cost-effective way to deliver information. The base system was designed and ready by Autumn 1994, and was up and running by the end of 1995. It is already being used by over 7000 people in the research group, spread across Europe and North America. Though there has been a Sun kit in GlaxoWellcome for some time the relationship started intensifying four or five years ago, when Sun was emerging as the leader in the Unix workstation market.