Nektar - Therapeutics Company gains agility and deliver technologies faster to consumers with IBM software.

Working with IBM, Nektar achieved the following benefits:

• Overall IT expenses have been reduced. The productivity of developers has been enhanced with the development of standard processes, tests and controls for software developers.
• New collaborative tools have helped researchers and managers bring online teams together to work faster and more effectively. This new ability greatly increases the team's ability to focus on the task at hand and makes Nektar overall much more of a flexible company to do business with.
• Employees are more efficient with the faster information search available. These benefits together shortened the time it takes to develop a new therapeutic working with a partner. This allows Nektar to deliver drug technologies quicker to its customers, and in turn, quicker to those who can benefit from the treatments.

Nektar (NASD: NKTR) is a U.S.$120 million publicly traded therapeutics company that specialises in advanced drug-delivery technologies. As a central part of its core business, it partners with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that develop therapeutic molecules. Nektar helps them make their drugs more effective by getting these molecules delivered to the right place in the body at the right time and in the right doses to ensure optimum therapeutic effectiveness.

In January 2003, Nektar was formed through a merger of three separate companies, all of which had different drug-delivery specialties. In order for Nektar to maintain its leadership and competitiveness, it needed to be able to integrate data and information from a wide range of sources. Also, given Nektar's partner-based business model, simple, straight-forward and easy communication and collaboration with all 29 of its partners would be required to avoid product development delays (which can be very costly for its customers and partners).

Nektar needed a collaborative solution that would make it easier to set up dynamic online teams and streamline the process of configuring teams, gathering and categorising key data, defining document types, and setting up discussion threads and collaborative meetings. The ability to focus and be flexible is key attributes of on demand businesses. This is why Nektar chose to become more of an on demand enterprise by working with IBM and the IBM Business Partner network. IBM and Cutting Edge Strategies, an IBM Business Partner, designed and implemented a portal solution for Nektar that integrated its three companies. The new portal allows researchers and engineers real-time access to information that is needed during the research and development (R&D) process and provides the collaboration it needed to decrease the product development time. The solution was based on IBM WebSphere® Portal Server, IBM Lotus® Notes® and IBM Lotus Domino® software.