How Roche revitalized customer analytics across its data estate

As the nearly 130-year-old pharmaceutical company consolidated its CRM systems, it cut down on vendor costs and paved the way for AI adoption.

Enterprise data stores expand day after day, piling up over the course of years. After decades of accumulation, unlocking the potential of even a curated estate becomes a herculean task.

At Roche, the nearly 130-year-old global pharmaceutical powerhouse, a tangle of mismatched systems stood in the way of efforts to extract deeper insights from customer data. Modernizing an ecosystem spread across more than 100 countries would also help mobilize AI adoption.

“The transactional systems were all different,” Joao Antunes, lead engineer of platforms and data strategy at Roche, told CIO Dive. “Point to any technology and there would be a country using that technology.”

The company was funneling customer data into multiple CRMs dispersed across its global network when Antunes’ team began a massive cloud-based modernization effort ...