SAS India Pvt. Ltd., one of the market leaders in Business Intelligence and Analytics space, intends to increase its presence in the pharma-biotech sector with its life sciences solutions. The company already has 70 per cent of the total installations in the pharma biotech sector in the country.

SAS' solutions provide technologies to meet the needs of the life sciences industry across the entire life cycle of a drug, from discovery and development, to manufacturing, sales and marketing, and administration.

The SAS solution is installed by a majority of pharma and biotech companies. This is because the US FDA reporting happens in SAS format and the company has been a part of the committee of the regulatory authorities which accepted much of its recommendations for drug approval methodologies. The BI platform covers clinical data management, clinical trails and drug development. The Indian market has been extremely receptive to the clinical data management and clinical trials offering. This is because of a boom in the clinical research sector in the country, said George Varghese, Head, Marketing & Alliances/ Pharma & ITES, SAS India Pvt Ltd.

The company has 155 installation in India which includes big names like Pfizer, Novartis, GSK, Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddys, Biocon, Sun Pharma, Zydus Cadila, Glenmark, Dabur to name a few.  Out of the 155 customers, 60 per cent are the from clinical research organisations. While CROs are going up the value chain in terms of orders for SAS as it bags a minimum of two orders a month, the company is now addressing areas of clinical data management, drug development, reporting and forecasting. Many pharma-biotech companies are looking at reporting and forecasting of sales, as business is intensely competitive. We have the right mix of solutions for the sector, Varghese stated.

To invest in SAS solutions in the clinical data management space, companies need to allocate between Rs 8 to Rs 25 lakh. The market size for BI in the country is estimated to be $35 million and its CAGR is pegged at 30 per cent which is faster than the overall software market of 18-20 per cent.

The SAS Group registered earnings to the tune of $1.53 billion from each of its verticals in the banking, telecom government and Lifescience segments. The Group is divided into two geographies—SAS America and SAS International. The latter covers Europe Middle East, and Asia which contributed 55 per cent of the earnings out of which 18 per cent was from Asian region.