Case Study: AbbVie achieves streamlined, large-scale collaboration and faster drug development with MarkLogic

Pharma Achieves ‘Collaboration on a Monster Scale’ Using Tools that Reduce Noise and Advance Teamwork

AbbVie, a global biopharma that collaborates with about 310 biotech, academic and government partners, was struggling with exploding intra‑business communication: multiple siloed apps, noisy group chats and poor integration made it hard for teams to find context and act efficiently across long, complex drug‑development projects. The company needed a way to make data deeply searchable, reduce context switching and bring collaborators into a single, flexible environment.

AbbVie’s Business Technology Solutions, with Maven Wave Partners, created the Ethos system—built on MarkLogic—to unify collaboration and no‑code apps. Ethos’ Buzz (team chat), Dash (searchable intranet) and Knowledge Notebooks (forms, data and workflow) use MarkLogic plus entity enrichment to surface relevant content in real time, reduce noise and let teams tune into what matters. The platform now supports about 1,500 notebooks, delivered an estimated $5M in IT capital savings and 10 FTE reduction in support, and has sped collaboration and process maturity across the organization.

Abbvie

Derek Debe

Director of Innovation and Emerging Technologies