Cubist does use Oracle's 11i ERP suite for financials, human resources and some manufacturing functions, Schmitz says, but the implementation will stop short of sales-force automation. "It's not that we're dissatisfied with Oracle's solution; it's just that their sales solution doesn't work for pharma-based sales," Schmitz says. "It's more geared toward the sale of widgets." In contrast to sales effort sat a manufacturing company that sells products to individuals, Cubist's sales staff tries to get hospitals excited about the potential benefits of its investigational drug Cidecin (for which Cubist filed a new drug application with the Food and Drug Administration at the end of 2002) - from getting them involved in clinical trials to selling them the drug once it's approved.

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."