Walter Billet Avocats (Alan Walter) advises Pierre Fabre when negotiating its IT outsourcing contracts

Advised by Walter Billet Avocats for the contractual aspects, the pharmaceutical company Pierre Fabre has launched a bid sollicitation in order to choose its new IT managers. The firm has selected Atos and Fujitsu.

The pharmaceutical company Pierre Fabre, which has decided to mission external services providers to manage its IT systems and operations since years, had previously signed a contract that was ending on December 31st, 2021. Thanks to a bid sollicitation initiated in early 2020, the firm has selected its new partners to mission.

These outsourcing contracts has been signed between Pierre Fabre and Atos and Fujitsu, the two companies it has selected for each of the two batches created – for infrastructures and users assistance.

High quality requirements

We were searching for some professional support in order not only to transform all or part of our Information System, but also to formalize and standardize our managed IT services, says Michaël Barberis, Pierre Fabre’s chief legal officer. Being part of the pharmaceutical industry, coping with strong quality requirements (such as documentation and tracking), we need to ensure that this activity will be conducted respecting the ISO 27000 standards to guarantee some tracking in case of audits and inspections.

Entrusting external services providers for this activity allows Pierre Fabre concentrating its staff and resources on high value-added tasks and respecting high constraints related to its activity.

Strategic interests contracts

Such outsourcing contracts must be cautiously calibrated as they often are of strategic interest for companies which decide to select external providers, regardless the sector they are part of, tells Alan Walter, the partner of Walter Billet Avocats, expert of IP /IT and personal data matters. Along with Pierre Fabre’s boards involved in this negociation, we have made sure that the services providers selected were able to manage legal, regulatory, technical and human issues and constraints, while ensuring some performance obligation within given deadlines.

 

Legal advisors involved:

Walter Billet Avocats – Alan Walter, partner – advised Pierre Fabre in close collaboration with its Purchasing (Andrée Wolff), IT (Sacha Hilic) and Legal (Michaël Barberis) boards.

Matthieu Mélin, partner of Astura, advised Fujitsu.