Pharmaceuticals merger presents major IT problems

Glaxo Wellcome's £114bn merger with SmithKline Beecham (SKB) has left a question mark hanging over the companies' information systems and the people who run them.

London-based Glaxo SmithKline will be a sprawling pharmaceutical giant with a leading 7.3 per cent global market share, sales of $17.8bn based on 1998 figures, and 107,000 staff worldwide. It faces the task of integrating largely heterogeneous software and hardware systems.

The mega merger will also have to deal with a replication of its IT personnel. Glaxo Wellcome said James Niedel, its executive director for science and technology, will take up the board-level technology post at the new group, with several heads of IT at different business units.

However, that raises questions over the future of John Parker, SmithKline Beecham senior VP and director of information resources, who is one of the industry's most respected CIOs.

One example of potential software problems lies with the messaging and groupware employees will use. Glaxo is a Microsoft Exchange user, while SKB has successfully implemented Lotus Notes and Domino.

Mark Raphael, Meta Group UK director of consulting, said: "Full merging of IT is often not achievable even in a three to five year timeframe, and company-wide projects in companies this size are difficult anyway. It makes the consolidation of key interfaces important."

Lotus' Jim Moffat, product marketing manager, reckons that the IBM subsidiary's groupware will win out at Glaxo SmithKline.

He said: "Lotus has a policy of co-exist and consolidate rather than rip and replace. What we often find is that Notes and Domino are used as a common infrastructure while a merger is carried out, and then users settle on our platform."

He cited the merger between Daimler-Benz (an Exchange user) and Chrysler (a Notes and Domino user) as an example.

This week's merger will also see decisions being made over hardware.

Two years ago, Glaxo Wellcome moved from seven PC suppliers to just one - HP. SmithKline Beecham uses IBM mainframes, AS/400 systems, Unix machines, Windows NT servers, and PCs from IBM.