fine-grain detail on individual prescribing habits of physicians, which pharma companies and investment firms purchase to evaluate healthcare trends. It says it processes more than 36 billion healthcare transactions worldwide each year, clearly creating a lot of data for analysis along the way.
IMS was publicly traded until 2010, when it was taken private by TPG Capital, CPP Investment Board and Leonard Green & Partners. The company said it had 7,250 employees worldwide in its last annual report filed in February 2010.
IMS has made a couple of other recent acquisitions other than Appature. Last April, it bought San Francisco-based DecisionView for an undisclosed amount, to get ahold of its software that helps pharma companies speed up enrollment in their clinical trials of new drug candidates. In January 2012, it acquired Bangalore, India-based PharmARC for its commercial analytics and services.
“Today, 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, president of IMS’s U.S. operations, in a statement. “They are looking for partners that can pull together the right market and technology expertise, information assets, and analysis to help them implement effective commercial strategies.”
The deal, as is often the case, grew out of what started as a partnership conversation, Shahani says. Appature had raised about $6 million in July 2012, so it had plenty of cash in the bank to operate its business and expand. It wasn’t actively looking to be acquired, but ultimately agreed because of the “favorable financial terms” and the ability to grow faster with the support of IMS Health, Shahani says.
