Sri is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and software executive with a proven track record of successful business leadership. Sri currently serves as Vice President of Product Marketing for Intralinks, the leading beyond the firewall collaboration solutions provider for the life science industry. Prior to Intralinks, Sri spent several years advising innovative technology startups such as Immunetech, the inventor of MyAllergyTest, the first FDA-cleared direct-to-consumer allergy diagnostic. Sri co-founded and served as President & CEO of Content Circles, an innovative company providing a cloud-based solution for secure cross-company file sharing and team collaboration, from its inception in 2007 through its acquisition in 2011 by Skype. Earlier in his career, Sri was a major player in helping Xerox revolutionize their enterprise content management (ECM) offering. At Adobe Systems, where he spent almost 10 years, Sri was a key contributor to the initial development and marketing of Adobe Acrobat and PostScript. Sri holds an MBA and MS in Computer Science from Santa Clara University.
“For life sciences organizations, the word of today is without a doubt, collaboration. With the continuous evolution of new technologies, coupled with the decreasing costs of outsourcing research, life sciences organizations have started shedding their core competencies and depending heavily on strategic outsourcing to restructure their development initiatives and go-to-market strategies.
I’ve had many years of experience in technology, primarily around cloud-based solutions and secure cross-company file sharing. I’m currently the Vice President of Product Marketing at Intralinks, the leading beyond the firewall collaboration solutions provider for the life sciences industry. At Intralinks, we enable our users to securely store information, share content and collaborate with multiple partners, anytime, anywhere. Intralinks VIA™ which helps life sciences organizations take lifetime control of their most important information was designed to support the demanding requirements of life sciences IT and central compliance functions, while freeing employees to reach new levels of productivity.
In our experiences, we’ve seen innovative life sciences companies migrate from the traditional fully integrated pharmaceutical company model (FIPCO) in search of more streamlined R&D paradigms, like the fully integrated pharmaceutical network (FIPNet). In moving away from the traditional model, life sciences organizations have replaced their core competencies with partners. But while FIPNet might be more efficient and cost-effective, it still brings challenges – like maintaining information security, timelines and auditable trails across organizations. With the increased reliance on collaboration with external providers and partners, beyond the firewall sharing has become unavoidable. In R&D, being able to share information quickly and frequently between multiple business partners is vital, but it’s even more important that the information shared be secure and compliant. Often when sharing content between several parties, data can become lost and private information can be mistakenly shared with the wrong person. Considering the sensitivity of R&D information and the regulatory nature of the life sciences industry, it’s essential that organizations take the utmost precaution when collaborating.
The four most common questions I hear from life sciences organizations about working across the enterprise are:
1) How can we accelerate productivity of partner relationships?
2) How can we protect IP and maintain compliance in the cloud?
3) What are the security and governance requirements of cloud-based solutions?
4) What should we consider when evaluating cloud-based collaboration solutions?
Fortunately, we live in an age where secure collaboration is possible – even for organizations in highly regulated industries. The challenge is keeping information secure and compliant without putting extreme restrictions on how teams share content and collaborate within their organization and with external business partners. Due to its benefits like security, streamlined auditing and reporting, and accelerated execution of projects and processes, it’s no surprise that life sciences companies are turning to the cloud and SaaS to ensure higher levels of compliance and streamline communication with their collaborative partnerships.
To educate life sciences organizations on how to accelerate productivity, securely and compliantly by collaborating through the cloud, Intralinks has partnered with Business Review Webinars. On June 5th, 2014 at 10:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM BST I will co-host a webinar with BRW to review the common challenges life sciences organizations face when attempting to streamline communication with external partners as well as discuss the benefits and risks of moving to the cloud.
I hope you will join me for the ‘Facilitating R&D Collaborations through the Cloud‘ webcast on June 5th at 10:00 AM EST / 3:00 PM BST. To register, please click here. See you there!”