Because Cubist is more concerned with its relationships with entire hospitals than individual doctors, Schmitz is looking for an account management rather than contact management tool. Oracle’s offering in this area, which focuses on the analysis of person-to-person encounters, would not, in Schmitz’s estimation, help Cubist track its success in selling hospital staff on the value of its drug. It’s a situation that arises from time to time, according to John Wookey, Oracle’s senior vice president of application development. "Our applications won’t always fit the specific needs of every customer," he admits.

The challenge for Schmitz will be in integrating an account management app with various outside sources of competitive sales data and hospital-specific sales numbers, such as IMS and Verispan, as well as applications to be introduced in the next year to automate clinical trial management, medical affairs and marketing campaign management. Web services, Schmitz says, is designed to standardize the method by which all of these applications exchange data and provide platform-independent EAI.

"I have seven new point applications I need to roll out in the next year that will need to talk to each other. Web services can tie together applications that were never made to interact with each other," explains Schmitz, who is using a Web services platform from Reston, Va.-based Dimension Data for a pilot application. Schmitz had success last year using Web services to tie Microsoft Outlook’s resource scheduling function to Cubist’s conference room phones to track meetings and make better use of the companies’ limited meeting space. He notes that a Web services approach tackles integration issues at about 75 percent of the cost of traditional middleware.

The standards-based Web services approach also makes scalability less of an issue than it is with the big enterprise application solution. Schmitz previously worked at PerkinElmer Life Sciences, an Oracle pharmaceutical shop, where he witnessed big problems (and even bigger costs) as the enterprise acquired more companies and tried to integrate a large number of customized applications. "Being in a much smaller company now with a huge potential for growth, Web services is very attractive," he says. "We can take a modular approach to delivering systems and simply plug in applications as they are completed, knowing that Web services will allow data exchange in real-time."

Compared with the traditional method of connecting point solutions via an interface, which must be done from scratch each time a new application is introduced, or implementing a big suite of applications that requires a CIO to rip out existing applications, Web services can be a less complex and costly proposition, Schmitz says. Once one application has been exposed as Web services, those services can be accessed in a standard way by any other application and on any other platform. Thus, Web services allows IT executives to leverage what’s already in place.