ELITE 2018 Entrepreneur Suresh Katta of Saama Technologies

Suresh Katta

Founder and CEO

Saama Technologies

Data Analytics Accelerating Drug Commercialization

When Suresh Katta founded Saama Technologies in 1997 to leverage his lifelong love of mathematics to solve complex, data-intensive problems, enterprise resource planning systems were transactional systems, not reporting and analytical systems. Suresh’s vision: Fill this void by connecting data from CRM, financial, and supply chain systems so clients had a “single version of the truth” about what was happening in their business. What began as a project-based data and analytics services company, evolved over the years to a platform-driven analytics organization. By 2011, Saama was building out solutions for finance, CPG, insurance, and healthcare customers.

A few years later, however, Suresh concluded that Saama needed to narrow its focus on one vertical market—the life sciences industry. Suresh identified a pain point: Life sciences companies found it difficult to procure data from all the diverse information sources they needed to access. Furthermore, life sciences companies could take as long as 10 years to bring a blockbuster drug to market and spend as much as $2B in the development process. Suresh felt confident that Saama could create an analytics solution that would unify the data sources and derive insights for clinical operations, shaving years off the launch of new drugs.

In September of 2017, Saama announced the launch of its Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC), which was designed to optimize clinical development processes and deliver business outcomes. This comprehensive ecosystem automated the whole process of ingesting a wide variety of structured and unstructured data, real-world data, clinical data (patient and operational), and simplified consumption system.

By using the platform, Saama clients have been able to achieve 10% efficiency in site identification timelines. They have also seen a 15% reduction in non-enrolling site cost, and the platform has helped to speed up time-to-market by almost 5x—compared to standard platforms. Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, recognized Saama with the 2018 Global Enabling Technology Leadership Award for this fluid analytics platform. And under Suresh’s leadership, Saama’s life sciences business has shown explosive growth in excess of 50% year over year for three years in a row since 2015.

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