SureClinical battles price discrimination with eTMF pricing

It’s often said that information is power – and today SureClinical empowered prospective eTMF cloud app users with the industry’s first transparent eTMF pricing policy.   In order to provide value to our prospective users and to help battle price discrimination – where prospective buyers are charged different prices according to their ability to pay – SureClinical has posted its prices and terms online.  As the first eClinical cloud software provider to post its prices online,  SureClinical believes that transparent pricing will benefit the industry and its customers, helping to deliver enhanced value, quality and productivity to customers.    As an industry-leader in the cloud electronic trial master file market segment (eTMF), we’ve published pricing for all potential customers and competitors to see on our website effective Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014.

If you are just starting to evaluate eTMF cloud applications or eTMF software for use in managing regulatory content and records for your clinical trial, no doubt you’ll talk to other eTMF vendors and view their websites.  Don’t be surprised if you don’t see any pricing posted by other eTMF vendors, and if one of the first questions from the other eTMF software vendors sales representatives is ‘what is your budget?’  Why are they asking this question?  I’ll tell you why – these eTMF vendors want to charge you based on your ability to pay, therefore maximizing their revenues at your expense.  At SureClinical we are 100% committed to our customers, so when we call don’t be surprised if we don’t ask you about your ability to pay – compared to the other on-premise, proprietary eTMF software solutions on the market today, our cloud solutions are just more affordable and deliver immediate value in days, not months. On Thursday October 2 an article in the Wall Street Journal compared enterprise on-premise software to cloud computing software.  Nothing short of a revolution is occurring in enterprises from small to large, as they move from traditional on-premise software installations to outsourced cloud computing.  On-premise enterprise software sales are declining while cloud software sales are growing at a 20% annual growth rate.   In the cloud computing revolution, cloud applications customers have new expectations related to pricing, availability, on-boarding time, interoperability and support. Just as other industries post their prices online to help customers in the product purchase process, we believe that transparent pricing practices will help you make decisions better and quicker.  We know that setting prices based on your ability to pay is price discrimination, an unfair and ugly practice that ultimately harms everyone.  In the cloud applications market, posting prices online is not only a trend in the growing cloud computing area, it’s expected and companies who don’t are suspect.  We’re not worried about what you will find when you look at our prices, since we’ve been told by our customers that we offer the best eTMF solution in the industry and we deliver the highest value when compared to other eTMF vendors. I also believe that the efficiency gained through cloud services should be reflected in our pricing, and it is.  We want to make it easy for biotech and pharmaceutical companies to engage with SureClinical and on-board to our services efficiently, as they transition to a paperless environment. When clinical practitioners are looking at their trial budgets, our simple and straightforward pricing structure enables them to start immediately and then scale up as the numbers of their clinical trials increase. Our collaborative team is committed to delivering value to our customers, and we believe a pivotal element of value is being transparent as to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our service. Our competitors purport Cloud efficiency and yet have not translated that into lower pricing for their customers.  They should. They are charging significantly more for their services than SureClinical while delivering a fraction of the value.  Moreover, many of our competitors’ systems are built on legacy software that has been “cloud-washed” – they simply take their legacy applications, host them on a cloud and call them cloud applications.   These types of solutions are inherently inefficient and have serious long-term, hidden maintenance and support costs. I believe SureClinical offers a compelling business value proposition that is experiencing rapid growth: a cloud-based, pay-as-you go model that provides a low cost, low risk, and highly flexible alternative to traditional software and hardware purchases. In addition to significant cost savings over traditional software, customers enjoy rapid deployment of their projects in a secure, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, validated solution. Our applications are available on a per clinical trial basis, making it easy to achieve budgetary goals. Alternatively, SureClinical’s applications can be integrated with existing on-premises or cloud applications through our cloud-based integration technology that works securely across the firewall. We may be the first eTMF cloud software vendor to fire the opening shot by posting transparent pricing, but we hope we are not the last to post prices online.  We’ll continue to lead the battle for customer value and satisfaction –   Viva la revolution!