In a conference call with investors Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata, said there are opportunities to win sponsor and contract research organisation (CRO) business “as a key competitor struggles to deal with integration challenges”.
Sherif said: “I heard concerns from key customers and CRO partners that our largest competitor is facing significant operational challenges as it looks to complete its integration, rationalise overlapping products and establish a credible road map for the future.
“What we’re hearing in the marketplace from multiple channels is that they’ve lost a lot of technical resource [and] there are product quality issues that are being exacerbated by some of the integration challenges that they’ve had.
“It’s created an environment that’s allowed us to not only go knocking on the door of some folks that have historically been very much in their camp, from a product usage perspective, but it’s allowing us to get in and actually run some studies for them.
“Basically there’s a transition underway and in any kind of transition like that it opens up the opportunity for customers to take a look at other technologies. We’re pretty excited by those opportunities.”
In the first quarter Medidata won 19 new customers and some of these came from the competitor. Sherif said: “We are definitely getting competitive wins, that’s very clear. It started last year.”
First quarter results
Quarterly operating income was up 18 per cent year-on-year as growth in revenues outstripped an uptick in costs and expenses. Medidata expects revenues to increase quarter-on-quarter.
Total remaining backlog for 2011 at the end of the first quarter was $104m (€72m), up slightly year-on-year. Medidata expects full year revenues to be more than $180m, up from $166m in fiscal 2010.
Shares in Medidata were down 0.48 per cent in after hours trading. In the day of trading before results were released shares closed down 6.30 per cent at $23.06.