Case Study: Global Pharmaceutical Company achieves dramatically faster, higher-quality drug discovery with Cloudera CDP Private Cloud

Increasing the speed and quality of the drug discovery pipeline

A global pharmaceutical company needed to accelerate and de-risk its drug discovery pipeline while cutting costs, but legacy, siloed data across clinical, lab and production systems made that impossible. The organization faced spiky “noisy neighbor” workloads that delayed analyses by weeks, tripled ETL demands, underutilized hardware, long upgrade SLAs, and a mandate to double daily workloads, users (1,500→3,000) and data (25 PB→50 PB).

The company deployed a hybrid data platform built on Cloudera CDP Private Cloud with SDX and Cloudera Data Science Workbench to unify, curate, secure and provide self-service access to governed data across on‑prem and cloud environments. The platform cut genome-wide association analyses from decades to weeks, made 97% of R&D data discoverable, reduced clinical trial analytics from months to minutes, enabled AI/ML-driven target selection, improved scalability and resource use, and delivered roughly $22.8M NPV over three years with about a 10‑month payback.