What we do is give you the ability to use any “front end” system as part of your ELN system – and our PatentSafe product stitches the whole thing together for you into a single repository. So chemists can do what they want from a Cheminformatics perspective, Biologists will generally use a whole variety of stuff, etc. etc. – and it can all get collated into a single system. Which is really the only approach you can take in diverse populations of users – which is to say, the situation most research organisations are in.

So it is very typical for our customers to have one or more Chemistry-centric systems, a couple of home grown systems to support specific activity, plus a bunch of ad-hoc stuff in Word and Excel. Rather than have to throw all that out (or integrated it painfully) to get a cohesive ELN system they can just use PatentSafe to stitch it all together, and keep the lawyers happy while they are at it.

(in case this causes concerns about the amount of integration required – rarely is any needed. The “buy it all from one vendor and you’ll save a fortune in integration costs” argument is nonsense).

I don’t know where the “ELN” is in that scenario which is why I have some difficultly with the term. Is it the many applications that are used by the users to do their daily work, or the application that actually replaces the paper notebook? Hence why I view it as a matter of creating an “ELN System” which is the sum of the constituent parts.

In terms of the Open Source software we use, PatentSafe is Java based and therefore use Java, Spring, Hibernate and a load of other libraries. If the customer has no firm views on Databases we’ll use Postgres although we have some where the policy is “There is no other SQL database other than Oracle” (or SQLServer) which we’re happy to work with – although Postgres is by far the most trouble free of all the databases we support! All our SaaS systems run on Postgres.

We’re finding that combination works well, for all sizes of customer – from a handful of users to many thousands of users on one server.

We do have a reporting/business intelligence product (“The Custodian’s Console”) written in Ruby on Rails – where we don’t need the same scalability as we have with PatentSafe. It is intended for just a few users in any given company, but the customer’s needs can be quite diverse so the flexibility of Rails really helps – and it means the customer can adjust things to taste themselves, if they so wish.