In the rapidly evolving pharmaceutical landscape, data fragmentation doesn’t just impair IT systems – it stifles innovation, delays life-saving treatments, and clouds strategic vision. For the global pharmaceutical leader Gilead Sciences, the stakes were even higher.

As a global Fortune 500 company with $28B in revenue, Gilead is known for its groundbreaking work in liver disease, oncology, and inflammatory conditions. With operations in over 35 countries, and a portfolio including some of the most impactful therapies in the world, Gilead’s ability to manage and harness data at scale is critical to both patient outcomes and business performance.

Before transformation, Gilead faced a fundamental challenge: critical data about products, customers, clinical sites, healthcare professionals, and suppliers was trapped in isolated systems. Sachin Sontakke, Head of Data and Analytics, R&D, PDM, Tech Ops and IT at Gilead, highlighted the challenges of lacking a unified data view:

“We couldn’t connect key relationships across entities,” said Sontakke. “If we wanted to know which investigator worked on which clinical site, or how a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) influenced product development, we had no unified view and data quality was lacking.”
Delving deeper, Sontakke explained, “If we wanted to know which HCPs are working on which product or clinical site, we had to deal with different sources of truth. We need to do 360-degree analyses across these entities to gain a strategic advantage.”
This lack of visibility had ripple effects across the organization – slowing down product launches, complicating regulatory compliance, hindering supply chain efficiency, and limiting business insights – ultimately impacting business performance negatively.

Recognizing that clean, connected data was no longer just an IT priority, but a strategic imperative, Gilead launched a bold, enterprise-wide master data management (MDM) transformation. Rather than making incremental changes, the company committed to building a scalable, cloud-native foundation for its data ecosystem.

Gilead’s business strategy required a data strategy where cross-domain intelligence played a more critical role – a strategy that could only be put in place via the scale and productivity of a modern cloud solution. A comprehensive, scalable MDM framework, resulting in:

• Multidomain solutions integrated across critical domains (products, clinical sites, healthcare professionals, and suppliers, for unified data views).
• Embedded governance structures ensure accountability and quality.
• Real-time access via APIs and data lakes through Informatica’s IDMC.
• Increased investments in advanced technologies and infrastructure including GenAI.
• Compliance with regulations.

This created a single source of truth for operations, analytics, and innovation – a trusted data ecosystem empowering advanced analytics and AI-powered decision-making.

Gilead’s phased approach ensured long-term success, through five key steps: 

1.  Ideate: Develop a compelling business case starting with essential domains, such as product data.
2. Discover: Develop an implementation roadmap for prioritized entities (product and medical affairs, for example) to enterprise MDM and governance strategy.
3. Deliver MVP: Launch a minimum viable product rapidly, focusing on product data utilizing IDMP standards through IDMC.
4. Scale: Expand to additional domains (clinical and supplier), ensuring reusability of data pipelines and governance models.
5. Sustain: Continuously monitor and improve data stewardship and quality, treating governance as an ongoing, integral concern.

“Gilead has deployed Informatica’s enterprise Master Data Management (MDM) solution for its product data, using a data model aligned with IDMP standards,” Sontakke said, before breaking down the process in more detail: “Data stewardship responsibilities are assigned at the IDMP class level, while overall product ownership is managed at the enterprise level. Gilead’s vision is to make product information accessible across all business functions – from research through to commercial operations – to support analytics initiatives and integration with downstream systems. The product master is a GxP-critical asset and underpins multiple GxP-compliant processes.”

Central to Gilead’s success is its hybrid ’hub-of-hubs' architecture. This model integrates master data across commercial, manufacturing, R&D, and HR business units, ensuring real-time data sync and a 360-degree view of key entities (HCP, HCO, Location, Site, Investigator, Product, Study, Patient, and Employee). The architecture supports seamless legacy system integration and effective data distribution through Gilead DnA (internal data sharing tool).

In addition, governance was embedded into Gilead’s operating model with an Enterprise Data Governance Council setting policies and cross-functional teams enforcing standards. This structure ensures swift decision-making, compliance, and scalable, trustworthy processes.

By adopting Informatica’s IDMC, Gilead benefitted from:

• No more infrastructure headaches: With SaaS, there’s no need to manage databases, app servers, or integration middleware.
• Faster speed to value: New systems can be deployed in days – not weeks or months – enabling agile implementation and faster impact.
• Microservices and metadata-driven architecture: Functional components are now modular “services” (or increasingly, “agents”), capable of sharing common metadata and scaling independently.
• High performance and scalability: The platform can flex to meet the needs of MDM, data governance, and analytics workloads as they grow or evolve.

Khoi Hoang, Informatica’s MDM Field CTO, emphasized how MDM implementations now take weeks instead of months with Informatica’s configuration tools and data models. “For life sciences, we offer HCP/HCO mastering and provide a data model to ensure IDMP compliance very quickly. ZS helped us with these accelerators and extensions so our customers can accelerate their MDM implementations.”

Gilead’s journey illustrates the transformative potential of enterprise MDM – not just as a technology initiative, but as a strategic enabler of business growth. The experience gained and the subsequent success Gilead experienced offer a practical blueprint for organizations leveraging connected, quality data for comprehensive business transformation.

To learn more and hear directly from leaders and decision-makers at Gilead, ZS and Informatica on how they collaboratively transformed Gilead’s business operations using enterprise master data management (MDM) and IDMC, watch this free webinar.