Many organizations have seen digital solutions transcend from an enabling, peripheral function to becoming central operationally.

And, now, these solutions are driving breakthroughs across a wider range of industries, one of which is healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

“We cannot release medicine without the use of technology,” said Wes Barnes (pictured, right), senior director at Pfizer Digital Solutions. “A huge component of our research is computational chemistry. Manufacturing medicines now is a practice in using data, analytics and predictive machine learning capabilities to help us determine how best to apply the capabilities to deliver the outcomes that we need.”

Barnes and Jon Harrison (pictured, left), managing director at Accenture PLC, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Walls at the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how digitization has become invaluable to Pfizer, as well as Accenture’s part in laying out the accompanying strategies. (* Disclosure below.)

Making the world a healthier place

Infusing the benefits of enterprise computing into life sciences to make a broader impact on patients worldwide has been one of the key motivators for Accenture in its partnership with Pfizer, according to Harrison. And in the past three years, Pfizer has taken up the onus of leadership in modernizing within the pharma space.

“As we talk a little bit about the role that we played together with Pfizer and AWS in their journey to the cloud, it’s so motivating for me personally and for every single person on the team that we asked to spend nights and weekends migrating things to the cloud, creating new capabilities, knowing that at the end of the day, the work that they’re doing is making the world a healthier place,” Harrison said.

Pfizer’s recent digitization push began in the pandemic’s wake during 2021. The company had to build up its clinical systems to support the increasingly high work volumes, according to Barnes.

“Despite 10 years of consolidating infrastructure and moving towards modern technology, last year, only 10% of Pfizer’s infrastructure was in the native public cloud,” he explained. “We were rolling things into our data center to build up the capacity to achieve what we needed to achieve. Moving to the public cloud became imperative to try to achieve the scale and the modern capabilities that we need.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent. Neither Accenture PLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE