Name: Clark Golestani
Job title: Vice president, IT
Company: Merck Research Laboratories
Location: Whitehouse Station, New Jersey
Award: Oracle Excellence Award for
CIO of the Year, Global Business Unit, 2011
Clark Golestani GLOBAL BUSINESS UNIT
Biopharma CIO sees IT as “the heart and the future” of the company.
For Merck, the second-largest biopharmaceutical company in the world, strategic competitive
advantage comes from being able to operate
at scale. That’s especially important when
you spend, as Merck does, US$8 billion a
year on research and development and have
a user base of more than 12,000 internal
and 100,000 external users. That’s why
Clark Golestani, vice president of I T at Merck
Research Laboratories and winner of the
Oracle Excellence Award for CIO of the Year,
Global Business Unit, likes Oracle solutions.
CATHERINE GIBBONS
“We went with Oracle because of the
architecture, strategy, and vision that it
brings forward,” says Golestani. “In our
testing of Oracle’s technology layer as well
as its application layer, we’ve found that
Oracle delivers.”
Golestani notes that Oracle’s life sciences
product set is the foundation for Merck’s
integrated development platform (IDP), a
solution in which “information is captured in
the clinic and managed all the way through
to when the product goes to market.” From
a scope and scale perspective, that end-
to-end process involves clinical investigators
conducting trials in more than 50 countries.
By the end of 2012, Merck hopes to be
integrated on a single instance of its IDP
across all key components, from electronic
data capture to clinical trial management.
