Through the expansion the company, which provides electronic data capture (EDC), management and reporting solutions for clinical trials across the globe, aims to attract more sponsors to use Rave, its Web-based EDC solution.
The new Houston-based data centre will provide all the benefits of a sponsor's own internal hosting - reliable storage, accessibility and protection of critical clinical data - without the costs, provisioning, ongoing maintenance and security or privacy concerns associated with the delivery of Web-based applications, said the firm.
The data centre is designed to handle thousands of clinical studies simultaneously and the new hosting services will allow customers to access new server deployments within 24 hours, and with Rave's thin-client architecture, immediately implement trials and manage clinical data globally without deploying unique hardware or software at the investigator site, the company said.
The centre will also provide fully-automated monitoring, intrusion detection and management to ensure early detection and correction of faults without service interruption.
"The facility was created in direct response to the customer's clinical research needs and allows us to manage operational control points to deliver a secure, accessible, highly reliable and scalable clinical data management solution anywhere in the world," said Louis Gilbert, vice president of information technology.
Medidata has also formed a new partnership with technology and outsourcing services firm C3i, who are in the business of helping companies improve customer management effectiveness while lowering the total cost of deploying and supporting a clinical or CRM environment.
At the new data facility C3i's tailored EDC clinical support services will ensure that Medidata's customers can quickly implement and conduct clinical trials using Rave while lowering overall IT costs, Medidata said in a recent statement.
With resources providing multi-lingual support in more than 15 languages, C3i will also enable Medidata to extend its help desk support, site assessments, hardware and telecom provisioning and clinical end-user training.
"As Medidata continues to implement some of the largest enterprise deployments in the industry, we are consistently taking steps to guarantee our customers the highest level of service to support their evolving clinical processes," said Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata Solutions.