How Cloudera Worked With Partners To Speed Up Pharmaceutical Research

Ramsey International, Modak and Cloudera teamed up to get crucial data into the hands of pharmaceutical researchers quickly.

Drug discovery requires high quality data. Ramsey International, Modak and Cloudera say they have the platform to deliver on that.

Mark Ramsey, Managing Partner of Ramsey International, has spent much of his career dissecting data. His company specializes in the design and deployment of large-scale analytics solutions, primarily for pharmaceutical and health care companies. His work has created huge value in speeding up the time for drug discovery, but it hasn’t been easy.

“If I think back 32 years ago, the struggle was how to find the data, how to bring the data together, and how to make the data accessible for analytics to make better decisions. If you fast-forward to today, those are still the same challenges that many organizations face.”

And they’re not the only challenges.

Organizations are now storing data in different clouds, and researchers must access that information from all environments. That brings into the mix another layer of regulatory and privacy concerns as the data moves across clouds.

Ramsey turned to Cloudera and Modak to develop a new solution to address his needs. Together, they unveiled Daedalus, a platform the team now credits with accelerating drug discovery by 4-times what it was before.

“We were able to accomplish in a much more accelerated time scale by using cloud resources and by automation,” Ramsey said.

That automation comes from Modak’s Nabu Platform.

“Within Nabu, we have a core capability called crawlers. And these crawlers go and index and go find the data and then populate the metadata, activate metadata repository. And, it’s that active data repository, which is then provided to go build out data domains and data products,” explained Baz Khuti, president of Modak U.S. “So it’s the crawlers which allowed this to occur, and then the orchestration of that data, once you profiled it, it’s using another technology Modak has within Nabu, which is called bots. And bots ... think of this as doing the heavy lifting of moving the data from one location to another location.”

The Cloudera offering on which the solution is built is an integrated data platform delivering a collection of services that are typically deployed manually. The Daedalus platform is exactly the type of solution that Cloudera wants to encourage more of its partners to produce.

“We’ve really focused the company around a vision to make data and analytics easy and accessible for everyone. And the reason that’s important for our partners is that it means we’re going to invest quite a bit in data-oriented APIs that make it easier for us to play with other technology vendors in the space. So it will be easier to plug and play Cloudera solutions with solutions with other important partners of ours,” said Mick Hollison, president of Cloudera.

For more coverage of Cloudera, stay tuned to CRNtv.