Executive summary
The emergence of the API economy threatens to disrupt incumbent companies across all verticals, from banking, to retail, to healthcare and life sciences.
Pfizer, one of the world’s three largest pharmaceutical firms, provides a striking example of how large, complex enterprises can build application networks to harness the power of the API economy. Through API-led connectivity, Pfizer has enabled secure access to data and services from core systems and enabled them to be composed into a distinct set of business capabilities, which can then be re-used across the value chain to meet disparate business needs. Management of product inquiries from clinicians and patients, for example, has been redesigned into a platform capability that can support omnichannel engagement from distinct clinician engagement platforms across geographies without requiring point-topoint interfaces for each channel.
Product development, too, has been transformed, with APIs enabling secure data sharing of clinical trials data with investigators and the applications they use. This, in turn, has enabled the development of composite capabilities like the Global Clinical Supply API, which has been used to proactively provide alerts about temperature controlled drug shipments to reduce drug spoilage during clinical trials execution. The application network serves as the organizing construct through which these capabilities are developed, consumed, extended, managed, and governed throughout the enterprise. As such, it serves as a foundational component for Pfizer’s digital platform.
In addition, by establishing a Center for Enablement (C4E), Pfizer has been able to realize the organizational change required to drive the production and consumption of these application network capabilities across the entire enterprise, not just central IT. In doing so, they have driven business innovation across all parts of the value chain, from the production of new drugs, to the process of bringing these drugs to market. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform and outcome-based delivery model have served as the core enabler for this technological and organizational transformation. As a result of this transformation, MuleSoft’s value assessment model projects that Pfizer will drive a projected 69.40% decrease in project delivery and maintenance costs for new applications consuming from the application network, which will allow them to reinvest in accelerated innovation.
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From projects to platform: How Pfizer built an application network to accelerate innovation
