IMS collates and then sells data - to Pharma themselves, to payers and providers and even to the Government. The "data" technically could belong to you and me or to the Pharma, but IMS is the one that pays the pharmacy for this data, arranges it neatly, tries to keep it HIPAA- compliant in its database and makes it available. This could be very useful to, say, analyze prescription trends (since the data includes prescribers' information), competition analysis or sales force effectiveness. Per their own words, they own about 85% of the world's prescriptions by sales revenue Recently, IMS also branched into technology service offerings including hosted applications, subscription software, analytics and consulting that is expected to drive their revenue growth more than their information services division. This makes it a very robust business model, strongly validated by their IPO and stock performance.