Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive (Part 1)

Excellis Interactive, based in Chesterbrook, Penn., is a company that serves businesses, primarily, in the life sciences industry, by converting enterprise software, websites and mobile solutions into applications by creating relationships between the way that users work and the way that they experience the applications they use to facilitate or support their day-to-day work functions. Excellis’ primary focus is on customer relationship management (CRM), so many of the company’s solutions focus on making the end user’s life less complicated.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Pete. Let’s start with context for our audience. Tell us a little bit about yourself as well as Excellis.

Pete Lagana: I am one of the founders and partners within Excellis Interactive. We’re an agency that focuses on a core competency of SAP CRM and other CRMS as well. We try to create some great products around CRM. We also do a lot around SAP mobility. We’re really big into the user experience in both of those avenues. We’re firm believer and are passionate about if you can improve the user’s experience, your product will be successful and users will keep coming back for more, and thus, it will be a win-win situation for the users and the companies these user experience tactics because it’s going to drive revenue for the. So, that’s what our company does. We have all kinds of Fortune 500 companies to do this. We do all kinds of things:  design, development, strategy, anything that customers and clients want to improve their user experiences of either CRM or their mobile initiatives. That’s what we mostly find ourselves engaged in … and happily so I might add.

SM: Give me some examples of the types of clients you particularly focus on. Is there industry bias, any sweet spot?

PL: The biggest sweet spot, probably, for us is within the life sciences industry. My background is in life sciences. A lot of our clients fit within that demographic. I’m talking about the Pfisers of the world, Merck, Schier, even within health services such as AmeriSource Bergen, Cardinal Health. Typically, we’ll do a lot of work with those kinds of companies. There’s all kinds of rules and regulations with doing business with pharmaceutical companies or within the life sciences sector and having that experience is helpful when you work with those kinds of clients.

SM: If you could, please explore with me some use cases, case studies of what kinds of projects, what kinds of mobility projects you are seeing coming up. What are customers looking for? What types of things are you developing? And what are some of the cutting edge stuff that you’re doing in that space?

PL: Right. If you talk about the life sciences demographic, you’re not really talking about cutting edge, first-mover types of individuals, or the sentiment isn’t necessarily geared towards being on the bleeding edge of technology. A lot of times rules and regulations within life sciences will hinder technological growth when it comes to, not necessarily technology related to developing products like drugs and things of that nature, but adoption of technology within the enterprise. For instance, mobility is just now starting to become something that CIOs are paying attention to in life sciences. Some are further ahead than others, obviously. But there’s always cause for concern around security and privacy issues and all kinds of things like that. Where the rest of the world is completely on board with Apple and Google and the App Store and Angry Birds and Facebook and all these things, there’s not such an issue about privacy on the consumer side. On the life sciences side, all of those things are very real obstacles. When you talk about a company like [PGi], it helps to understand how the industry really works, what are some of the pitfalls and gotchas. What are the applications and who are the people who need to use those applications within the pharma industry. There’s a wealth of different individuals who need to use our technology. You’re talking about research scientists. You’re talking about health care professionals. You’re talking about sales reps, even within the organizations. And then you talk about your specialty distributors, manufacturers, of course, pharmaceutical companies and your wholesalers, a whole network of individuals in this lifecycle and supply chain.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive
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