The New Computing Pioneers

It may no longer be fair to characterize large pharmaceutical firms as late adopters of information technology (IT).

Having spent the past five years catching up to other industries in the deployment of enterprise software systems that link researchers and laboratories companywide, big drug firms are now starting to push data storage and processing onto the Internet to be managed for them by companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on computers in undisclosed locations.

Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Johnson & Johnson, and Genentech are among the drugmakers that are piloting into an emerging area of IT services called cloud computing, in which large, consumer-oriented computing firms offer time on their huge and dispersed infrastructures on a pay-as-you-go basis. These drug companies are among the first to gauge the cost- and time-saving pros and the potential management and security cons in this largely uncharted territory.