Pasqual Zottola
Executive Director – Information Technology
Acorda Therapeutics, Inc.
The Ultimate Connector
One of the most important aspects of technology lies in its ability to connect people. And in an industry such as pharma where employees are based in multiple countries, sales teams are always on the road, and departments are often siloed off from each other, it is important to find new ways to keep people connected and ensure everyone is on the same page. Pasqual Zottola has helped to foster Acorda’s use of technology to revolutionize connections within the company.
For starters, he changed how employees at Acorda share and access files. Pasqual championed the implementation and adoption of Syncplicity, which combines the sync & share capabilities of systems like Dropbox with the security of being an in-house system. Additionally, his mobile solution, bigtincan, was rolled out to sales reps to meet the increasing demand for real-time access to the most relevant and up-to-date information. And his “Always-On” systems ensure that employees always have access to their email and other business critical systems—they never go down for maintenance and will not crash in the event of a server failure.
While working in a highly regulated industry is no simple task for any company, Pasqual’s work has made life at Acorda a little easier. Cisco Jabber, the company’s all-in-one communication tool, proved its worth during two recent FDA inspections as the tool enabled the inspection team to communicate with the archival team to quickly retrieve the records requested by the FDA. So the overall process was quick, painless and efficient.
But that’s not all. Pasqual also helped increase Acorda’s customer satisfaction rating to an all-time high. By deploying the company’s first in-house call center, he established a system that is capable of resolving 75% of helpdesk requests within minutes. And Pasqual is never done tinkering. His next project: Overhauling newly-acquired Acorda Chelsea’s (formerly Civitas) datacenter and synchronizing it to the company’s datacenter to ensure quick recovery from any major failure at either site.
