RSS feedsIt’s “small but perfectly formed”. That’s how Tim Hamer, UK head of Thomson Scientific, describes the business he runs. In fact, the size of Thomson Scientific is all relative.
It depends which way the numbers are compared.
In relation to its parent company, US-based information giant Thomson, Thomson Scientific is certainly a fairly small piece of the pie, accounting, together with its sister division Thomson Healthcare, for just 12% of the total Thomson annual turnover.
In its own field, Thomson Scientific looms fairly large, with a 2005 turnover of just over $500m (£267m), of which 83% came from electronic software and services. Thomson Scientific also differs from its parent company in that slightly more than half its business is outside North America. It is also growing fast.
The fact that most of Thomson Scientific’s turnover now comes from electronic software and services underlines a point made by Tim Hamer when I meet him in London – that his company is not a publisher, but an information business. “We left publishing years back. We are now into delivering products to help with knowledge management,” he comments.
Thomson Scientific was formed in 2002 from several existing parts of Thomson, including ISI, where Hamer was head of European operations. Since then, there has been an active acquisition programme to round out the Thomson Scientific portfolio, with the purchase of eight more businesses, of which the most recent was the takeover of Epsom-based Centre for Medicines Research International (CMR), a specialised pharmaceutical information provider. These acquisitions have formed part of Thomson Scientific’s continuing intent to increase its technical and content provision, as it continues to move away from the role of traditional publisher.
In addition to his role running the UK operation, a role he took over in 2005, Hamer also heads up global marketing services for Thomson Scientific. The business operates in three main areas: pharmaceuticals and chemistry; corporate, which is mainly focused on engineering information; and academic and government markets.
A place in the market
Thomson Scientific’s flagship products and services include the Derwent World Patents Index, Medistat, Current Drugs and Micromedex, as well as its Web of Science, which provides access to information from 8,700 research journals, with some back issues dating more than 100 years.
Web of Science comes from what was formerly ISI and has given Thomson Scientific something of a headstart, according to Hamer, in getting into the online world of scientific citations across different sectors. Web of Knowledge, which is based on the Web of Science platform, has a strong toehold within the UK higher education market.
“Competition is good, because it chivvies you along,” says Hamer. He believes Thomson Scientific is able to differentiate itself within the marketplace with its combination of heritage and innovation. “We have a huge heritage, going back to just before the 1900s and we have built on that with an emphasis on quality,” he says. At the heart of the company’s product set are the Derwent Patent Index and the Web of Science.
“Very few companies have two such strong core datasets,” claims Hamer. “But the other piece is about being innovative. The whole ethos is about trusted information and our new value is the expertise that we bring.”
Customer relations
The pharmaceutical sector is hugely important to Thomson Scientific; GlaxoSmithKline is its largest customer. A great deal of Thomson Scientific’s recent emphasis on developing new products and services has been with its pharma customers in mind and it has been looking at how to become more responsive to customer needs.
Thomson Scientific has gone about this in a methodical way, setting up a programme called the Front End Customer Strategy (FECS). “We were already working with our customers, but in more of an unstructured way,” Hamer explains. “This is a framework that is being used right across Thomson. It is about starting to work as one Thomson, so yes it is all about common sense to a certain extent, but this gives us a formal framework, an ability to map markets and so on.”
In the pharmaceuticals sector, in particular, this has led to work in new areas. “We suddenly started to understand one particular piece of the pharmaceutical workflow and that was in the area of regulatory processes,” explains Hamer. “A lot of pharmaceutical companies have a huge task when it comes to getting drugs regulated. Getting a week off that process can provide great rewards. So we have been working closely with Dow, looking at electronic, common technical documents. We didn’t have expertise in this area, but we have brought that in with our acquisition of Liquent. Working together, we believe we are able to shave between five or 10 days off that regulatory process, and that whole approach certainly came from the FECS.”
Thomson Scientific’s 1,100 UK staff are located in several different offices. The head office is in London, but there are also locations in Glasgow, Manchester, York and Chippenham. The recent acquisition of Epsom-based CMR is important, says Hamer, in adding to the business’s growing interest in providing professional services as well as information. “CMR is a relatively small business, but it is very important because it takes us from just providing the data into a consultative role,” he comments.
One of the achievements of which Hamer is most proud has been the development of Thomson Pharma. Launched in January 2005, Thomson Pharma is an information system
that integrates several Thomson databases into the workflow of the drug discovery and development process, providing research tools for professionals working at all stages of drug development.
The system provides content from legacy Thomson products, such as Derwent World Patents Index, Delphion, Drugdex and Web of Science. In September 2005, Thomson Scientific announced that more than 100 organisations in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries had signed up for Thomson Pharma, including 40 UK customers.
“That was the first integrated electronic solution in its area and it came out of our work with pharmas,” comments Hamer. “The whole point is that Thomson Pharma works in the way that our customers work, from bench chemist through to commercialisation. And it is customised, so it is the same product, but different users see what they need to see. It is revolutionary, because it is dynamic and one of the challenges has been working with customers to see just how revolutionary this is. People are used to seeing fixed information, but with this dynamic system, if they do a search one day, and then again the next, they will see new information. In addition, it’s key for pharmaceutical companies to be able to integrate this type of product into their own platforms and that involves a lot more consulting work.”
Changing from within
Keeping up with changes in the marketplace, and ensuring the business remains innovative, while retaining its focus on high-quality information, is a challenge, acknowledges Hamer. Thomson Scientific has been making internal changes to attempt to ensure teamwork is foremost, rather than different parts of the company working in isolation and that is always a challenge when, as in this case, there has been rapid expansion through acquisition.
Thomson Scientific aims to double in size in the next three years and that will be a challenge, admits Hamer, but one the company needs to face in what he sees as a rapidly expanding marketplace. “We see a lot a information-hungry institutions, still relatively poorly served,” he says. “We see a big opportunity to come
in and provide much more value for the users. It’s all about joining things up. It is a huge potential market and, so far, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
Geographic expansion is likely. “Asia Pacific is a huge potential market,” Hamer points out. “We have a strong presence there already – we have been in China for 30 years – but as China now moves from low-cost manufacturing into low-cost innovation, we believe there will be huge demand for greater research and information, which will need to be supported.”
The internet effect
Hamer believes the recent and rapid take-up of free online search engines has helped drive forward the business of companies such as Thomson Scientific. “Free services have helped to expand our market,” he says. “On the one hand, people may look at this kind of free service, but as soon as you are making multimillion dollar decisions, you want your data to be as comprehensive and as high-quality as possible.”
In addition, Hamer believes the greater familiarity we all now have with search possibilities, as a result of services such as Google, means greater use by his customers of Thomson services. In the first quarter of 2006, the number of sessions run by Thomson’s serious users rose by 100% over the same quarter the previous year. “Google is the best thing that happened,” Hamer says. “We have certainly kicked up a gear as a result.”
In 2005, Thomson Scientific recorded more than 54 million user sessions for its Web of Knowledge service, with each user also accessing the resource for longer.
“A lot of the technology is in place, but for us the main opportunity is the area of collaboration,” says Hamer. “That has to be the way forward. It is all about integration and expertise, because we have to be responsive to customer needs. In some areas, they need their information to be proprietary; in others, they have more open information needs.”
The key challenge now for Hamer and the rest of Thomson Scientific is about pulling together a clear Thomson brand, while retaining the individual expertise within different parts of the business. “Customers like us as Thomson,” says Hamer. “It is a brand that is seen as reliable, and here for the long term.”
In financial terms, says Hamer, the Thomson Corporation is not as prone as some of its rivals to what he describes as “knee-jerk reactions.” He says the company is agile and has aggressive targets, but also invests in long-term strategic aims.
Hamer has been with Thomson Scientific since it was founded in 2002, and with Thomson-owned ISI for seven years before that. He has seen a lot of change in the past few years and believes it is moving the business forward in the right direction. “The world has changed and that is why Thomson is not today seen as a publisher,” he says. “We are looking at the much bigger world.”
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