Arbortext Targets Drug Developers

The company on Monday said enhancements to its Epic software include change tracking capabilities, better support for Active-X, support for digital signatures and watermarks and stronger integration with Documentum's content management software, which is widely used in the pharmaceuticals industry.

Arbortext, Ann Arbor, Mich., which develops software used for creating, assembling and publishing complex technical manuals, began focusing on the pharmaceuticals market internally about a year ago, said PG Bartlett, vice president of marketing.

"Twelve months ago our business in the pharmaceuticals industry was very small, but now it's our third largest (market) behind government and financial services," he said, and accounts for about 15 percent of sales.

He said the market was being driven by the need for drug manufacturers to comply with regulatory requirements for such things as product labels and inserts, which need to be generated for separately each form, dosage and packaging of the drug. "You can have as many as 900 documents for every single drug," he said. "Today everyone of those documents are created, reviewed and changed separately."

With Epic, a change made in one piece of content can be reflected in all of the documents assembled from the content, he said.

In Europe, Arbortext is working with the EMEA, the European equivalent to the FDA, on a pilot project to use the software to simplify the approval process for drug labeling. In the U.S., Arbortext signed an agreement with First Consulting Group, Long Beach, Calif., to resell Epic with the company's FirstDoc suite of applications. First Consulting, which had $267 million in sales last year, is also a large Documentum partner.

Bartlett said other strong growth markets for Arbortext include the financial industry, where companies want to create more customized documents, and government sector, particularly among agencies involved in homeland security.

"The beauty of XML is it provides structure. You can take this massive intelligence, mark it up using standard tags, and do automated processing," he said. "National security applications have been pretty big for us, especially in the last year."