As one of the more established companies providing electronic data capture (EDC), Phase Forward has only a handful of competitors of similar size and an impressive list of major customers. Just recently, Lilly announced it would be extending its use of Phase Forward’s InForm software.

But it can be hard for EDC companies to set themselves apart: long-running projects mean the software cannot be changed much from one year to the next. For its part, Phase Forward is using an industrial-strength web-acceleration company. It outlined the reasons at this year’s annual Drug Information Association meeting, and we connected with the company after the conference.

Latency Issue

Rich Deyermond, Phase Forward’s VP of global customer care, says Phase Forward heard isolated, hard-to-pinpoint reports of latency. The firm had been using the services of Coradiant and Gomez to understand the performance of its network. “We used those two tools to grab a lot of data about end-user performance,” says Deyermond.

The initial hunch was that many of the problems were in remote parts of the world (China, India and similar locales). Even building additional data centers there, Deyermond suggested, would not necessarily solve the problem of ephemeral network glitches that can arise from moment to moment in one part of the world or another.

So the company enlisted Akamai, which specializes in helping large retail, media and other companies accelerate the delivery of their online content. Akamai’s network of facilities (with 34,000 servers spread across 70 countries) is hard to beat. We don’t know exactly which Akamai services Phase Forward is using, but this page touts Akamai’s effort to accelerate web applications.

Using Akamai doesn’t sound particularly difficult, at least for Phase Forward. The Waltham, Mass., firm needed to install a few routers, and was up and running quickly. “We saw immediate results,” says Deyermond, especially for the few percent of users who had reported problems. “We had a 10-fold increase in end-user throughput coming through our system. If you were in a network-challenged area, you would definitely notice it.”

Protected Packets

“Those particular issues around latency are not really there any more,” Deyermond says. “We saw a 50 percent reduction in reports of performance complaints.”

Best of all, if some fishing boat slices a transoceanic cable, or an earthquake hits a key network switching point, there is no need to tell Phase Forward customers about some new URL. The ongoing work of a clinical trial won’t be delayed. Much of that data can be re-routed automatically in such circumstances, but the company will be able to help clinical trial sponsors work around the issue.

There’s no silver bullet in such cases, Deyermond says, noting that other aspects of the company’s IT infrastructure (from Oracle, EMC, Cisco and other firms) is carefully tuned and upgraded as needed to ensure maximum performance.