By Wayne Crandall, President & CEO

CYA Technologies

Alex Reznitsky discovered the value of CYA’s flagship product, CYA SmartRecovery™, while serving as a systems administrator for Connecticut-based Boehringer-Ingelheim, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world with sales of $10.9 billion last year.

At Boehringer, he was in charge of ensuring continuous access to critical information housed in the company’s enterprise content management (ECM) system, which it used to facilitate compliance with numerous industry and government initiatives, streamline clinical trial processes, and manage extensive paperwork associated with FDA drug approval processes. Should the information within the system become inaccessible or corrupt due to a user error, virus, power outage, or other common occurrence, it could cause a delay in a drug’s time to market, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars in potential revenue, compliance risk, and other disastrous consequences.

CYA SmartRecovery™ protected Boehringer’s ECM investment, ensuring business continuity and 24×7 access to accurate data by enabling inaccessible and corrupt information to be quickly recovered in its original state without any business disruptions. Whether a user accidentally deleted one critical document, or a virus corrupted thousands of documents, Alex could recover them within minutes without taking users offline. In short, CYA SmartRecovery kept the core business processes that drive a global life sciences giant operating.

Alex eventually made the transition to Achillion Pharmaceuticals, a small, growing biopharmaceutical firm and Connecticut Innovations portfolio company. At Achillion, Alex quickly found that although the company was miniscule compared to Boehringer, the challenges they faced with their ECM system were identical, albeit on a smaller scale.  There, too, it was crucial to ensure continuous access to clinical trial information, FDA submissions and numerous other documents and their complex, associated audit trails, digital signatures and other metadata.   

Once again, Alex turned to CYA, a fellow Connecticut Innovations portfolio company, to protect his company’s ECM system information. Having worked closely with us at Boehringer, he knew he could depend on CYA SmartRecovery to safeguard Achillion’s most valuable corporate assets. Because CYA SmartRecovery is a completely scalable solution, the fit was just as perfect for Achillion as it was for Boehringer.

In working with Alex at Boehringer and Achillion, we affirmed that size doesn’t always matter –  companies both large and small face many of the same challenges, particularly in the life sciences industry, where you have to conform with an exhausting list of regulations whether your employees number 20 or 20,000. It’s often just the scope of the challenges that differ, and as a company selling a product offering benefits that can be realized by companies of all sizes, your prospects are only limited by the scope you want to accept.

CYA is proud to be a Connecticut Innovations portfolio company for close to a decade. We’re looking forward to continuing our mutually beneficial work with Achillion and other portfolio companies, because it’s from these relationships that we learn invaluable lessons that enable us to continue to grow and prosper.

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