SIRO Clinpharm to implement Oracle Life Sciences applications to improve operational efficiencies in clinical development

Company Brief

New Delhi, February 19, 2008

SIRO Clinpharm Private Limited (SIRO), one of India's leading clinical research organization (CRO), has decided to implement a new IT framework comprising Oracle's Life Sciences Applications (OLSA) and other Oracle applications running on Sun Microsystems' (Sun) hardware platform. This IT infrastructure will be implemented by DBMS Consulting (DBMS), a member of the Oracle Partner Network. This new IT system is expected to bring about greater efficiency and increased customer focus in SIRO's operations. The new system will touch and impact over 500 SIRO clinical researchers involved in more than 150 clinical studies.

Established in 1996, SIRO offers end-to-end clinical research services, with clinical trials management and clinical data management as its core operations. SIRO required a solution that was robust, with industry best practices that could scale up rapidly to meet the company's growth demands. SIRO will implement Oracle's Life Sciences Applications as a complete electronic information environment, for gathering and reporting clinical data. Besides reducing errors, Oracle's Life Sciences Applications will enable SIRO to speed information gathering and reduce the need for paper documentation.

Dr. Chetan Tamhankar, Chief Operating Officer, SIRO said, "We have growing at an aggressive rate for the last three years. To sustain our aggressive growth plans, we are looking at both organic and inorganic growth options across the globe. Oracle Life Sciences will help us achieve this by delivering a powerful combination of technology and comprehensive business applications, and key functionality built specifically to address the nuances of the CRO industry."

"SIRO will use the new IT infrastructure to provide better efficiencies and better feedback to clients. The application suite will also help us integrate our expanding global operations. We will be able to track, monitor and ensure optimum utilization of our resources across locations. We found the combination of Oracle's Life Sciences Applications and Sun hardware best suited to our rapid growth requirements and our needs for continued regulatory compliance. DBMS' domain knowledge and Oracle implementation skills gave us the comfort to embark on this ambitious project," said Mr. Vishnu Banka, Senior Vice President, Finance and Corporate Strategy, SIRO.

"All ten of the world's top CROs use Oracle Applications," said Mr. Nitin Paranjpe, Director for Applications Sales, Oracle India "SIRO's new IT infrastructure with Oracle Life Sciences Applications provides them with a greater competitive advantage in providing clinical research services to the

global life sciences industry."

"We are committed to the Life Sciences space in India and the greater Asia-Pacific region, and believe that our vast global experience will transform all of our Oracle Life Sciences Applications customers into market-leading enterprises, not only in a business process outsourcing capacity, but also as preeminent 'best-in-class' leaders," said Mr. Sunil G. Singh, CEO of DBMS Consulting.

"The CRO industry has unique technology requirements in data mining, data warehousing, and enterprise application integration functions. This discipline requires systems that offer them robust performance and are scalable to address the exponential growth in their data. Sun Microsystem's infrastructure platform supporting an Oracle solution will help SIRO Clinpharm to optimize their technology infrastructure and respond to regulatory and competitive pressures, and enable greater use of tools to automate collection, searchability, transmittal, and storage of data," said Mr. Rajesh Rege - Director Sales, Sun Microsystems. "Sun products & technologies are compliant with regulatory mandates for harmonization of data exchange and this will continue to power the transformation of research into radically improved medical care," he further added.

Oracle's Life Sciences Applications for clinical development provide a streamlined system for managing large volumes of patient data collected during clinical trials. These applications offer features for modeling clinical studies, capturing and managing clinical data, managing clinical trials, and capturing and reporting adverse events.

SIRO will be using Sun's Intel offering for application servers, RISC (UNIX) based solution which projected the best scalability, reliability and availability along with Solaris' 10 operating system for database layer and Sun blade servers with Intel Quad Core processors for consolidating their existing edge servers into one window management. For storage, SIRO will use Sun's SAN solution along with SL48 tape library for backup. Sun was the single vendor that could provide x64 platform for App layer, RISC systems for Database layer, primary and secondary storage and backup solutions.

SIRO estimates market size of the CRO industry in India at USD 2billion by 2011. Since the CRO business model is heavily reliant on project, trial and data management, it presents a healthy business opportunity for IT infrastructure and software solution providers.

For further information please contact:

Sun Microsystems India Pvt. Ltd.

Bipasha Chakrabarti

Tel: +080- 66930600/Ext: 89659

e-mail: mailto:bipasha.chakrabarti@sun.com