Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.

For the background see the original post on Ironic Sans blog where this is one of a series of Inventor Profiles.

Kodak were Amphora’s first customer, we started working with them and ELNs way back in 1996… the comments in this post give some additional background into Kodak’s lead in digital imaging and the “Innovator’s Dilemma” problem they had in commercialising that.

Basically you can print into PatentSafe just like you can from a desktop application… which is pretty cool!

As a general rule Apple MacOS X, Linux are second class citizens in the ELN world and it is all the salesperson can do to stifle a laugh when you mention those “other platforms”. The iPad and Android equivalents don’t even get a look in!

I’ve felt this situation is increasingly unsustainable – not only is Apple’s Macintosh experiencing a resurgence, but we’re quite possibly on the cusp of a tablet-drive revolution.

An interesting blog post from the CTO at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions wonders if their current Windows desktop refresh might not be their last.

Personally, I think it likely this is the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys, though.

The reason? I think they’ll be fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that’s coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most stuff will arrive via the browser.

Talking with our larger Enterprise customers, it appears their Windows Desktop infrastructure is increasingly cumbersome and it is very hard to innovate in such a complex environment. In the smaller Biotechs there’s a real push to avoid cumbersome IT generally and there’s ready adoption of web and Cloud technologies, as well as additional platforms such as Macs and iPads.

The article makes a good long term point which ELN project teams should urgently consider:

From a strategic point of view, if you’re designing the future technology estate of a large organisation, that last thing it makes sense to do in this kind of context is build stuff that depends on a desktop stack. Furthermore, decoupling legacy from the desktop stack also has to be on the agenda, because you just can’t count on that stack being relevent in 10 years time.

Most ELN products on the market are tightly linked into the Windows ecosystem, even to the extent that one vendor just trumpeted the re-launch of their ELN which is now completely based on SharePoint!

My feeling is that organisations looking for an ELN which is going to last for more than 2 years should consider a situation where there are more than just Windows Desktop PCs in their IT infrastructure – not an unreasonable consideration, but one that needs thinking about up front rather than purchasing a product that locks you in to a dying ecosystem. The Windows PC isn’t going to be replaced but it won’t be the only way you’ll want to access your ELN, and whatever you select needs to be able to work with whatever you might adopt. That such lightweight “thin” solutions are easier to deploy than a thick client just icing on the cake.

(update: this story has been picked up in The Register)

A good Electronic Lab Notebook takes careful design; the foundation of this is what does, and more importantly what it doesn’t do. This is really hard, as evidenced by the complexity that can creep in to products as you add feature after feature. Apple’s success is built upon design and the fact that better-resourced competitors can’t keep up shows just how difficult it is to get design into your corporate DNA.

I’ve always felt that ELNs are particularly susceptible to “Kitchen-sink” tendencies; the term is so badly defined, and the potential use cases so broad that you can easily find yourself needing to add more and more functions until you end up with an unholy mess which then:

• Requires a lot of consulting to customise the application to fit the needs of any group of scientists
• Is complex to master, requiring quite extensive training time

In PatentSafe we’ve taken a different approach – less is more. Our aim is to allow our users to use any application as part of the ELN experience, and we’ve come up with a handful of basic concepts which can be mastered in lass than 15 minutes and allow the user to use all their existing applications and work processes unchanged.

I’d to claim this is as a result of an amazing design philosophy but in truth it is a product of where we started. Most ELN companies started either in big Pharma (or were swiftly pointed in that direction by their VCs). Amphora in contrast started out working with Kodak and then into companies such as DuPont, PPG and J&J – doing really very large deployments (100′s to 1,000′s of users). When you’re rolling out that many seats especially into the very diverse research environments of chemical companies, you have to keep things ruthlessly streamlined and build on what’s there, because it is just physically impossible to customise the ELN for each group.

When we started to work with Biotechs this experience really paid off:

• Biotechs don’t have the resources to pay for a long consulting engagement and lots of software
• Biotechs will often change their entire business over a period of years; if their ELN was overly customised it would be hard to prevent it becoming a business-threatening impediment to change

It is interesting that Biotechs really have a lot more in common with diverse Chemical companies when looked at this way; most people seem to think Biotech is just little Pharma, but nothing could be further from the case when you are deploying IT.

Less-is-more is also helping us as we move into additional devices such as the iPad. PatentSafe is device-, application-, and discipline-agnostic, so the iPad just fits right in.

When we first started out I was always worried that we would need to add a lot more functionality to the core product to meet market demand. It turns out that resisting this was one of the best decisions we made as a company – we now have a product that can be dropped in almost anywhere and used immediately, which is dramatically different from the alternatives (so much so that people often think we’re lying when we say no consulting and 15 minute training time!).

I can’t help but feel that our market-leading presence is down to what we decide not to do, instead choosing to work with what’s out there. I’d like to think that what we’ve done is technically excellent, and PatentSafe has a number of very powerful features. But it is the features we chose not to implement which make PatentSafe so quick and easy to use, and able to stand the test of time as our customers’ business change.

(this post was inspired by “Simplicity isn’t that Simple” on 52 Weeks of UX blog.

In an article on 52 weeks of UX, exploring “The Distance Between Maker and User” the following principle is espoused:

As the distance between the maker and user increases, so does the difficulty of designing a great user experience.

This is our approach to usability – we make sure the Geeks are never too far away from the end user, and we achieve this in the following fairly simple ways:

• The people responsible for writing our products support them. We don’t have a support team – the guys helping our customers are the ones who you will speak to if you have a problem or need advice. This is probably the our effective way of increasing usability because not only do the developers get swift feedback on their decisions, they have an incentive to engineer out problems at source.
• We regularly review the kinds of issues we’re getting and see if we can make them go away entirely. Sometimes this is a re-worded screen, sometimes it is removing a step or component completely. I appreciate lots of vendors do this as part of a standard quality process, although we tend to do it in fairly tight feedback loops.
• We use the product internally. Did you know that PatentSafe makes an excellent financial records system? . Not only does that mean we have internal customers who deliver feedback every day, but the developers (and managers!) interact with our products daily. You’d be surprised how many little tweaks come out of this, things that customers probably notice but don’t think it is worth bothering us with.
• Our Sales, Development, Admin and Management teams are all co-located in the same office space, which means there’s lots of gentle interaction and sharing of context. It is interesting how often a problem in one area can be resolved in another. There are some problems with this because the different functions have different working styles (for example sales people switch context every 10 – 30 minutes, developers every few hours) but some simple informal rules make things easier.

Every time we bring someone new on board they are surprised that we aren’t more “formally” organised, but so far this setup has really helped us. It does mean we need to check that techies also have people skills, that our admin people need to be slightly more techie, and our sales people do need some involvement in the more geeky side of the shop. However it does seem to work very well for us, as demonstrated by the short training period that new users need to get up to speed with our ELN, and also the low volume of support calls we get (which apparently is very low compared to most software vendors).

Interestingly once new employees get over the initial shock of the proximity of roles, they really enjoy the richer environment it creates.

Having a small distance between the designers and developers is something that happened when we were a small startup, but I’ve come to view it as tremendously important for our ongoing success.

We’ve always had a very straightforward model; because our Electronic Lab Notebook needs to know about every user to do its job (every user needs to be uniquely to sign and witness their entries), it is easy to just charge for the number of users which are enabled on the system. Fairly straightforward.

We do have a slight complexity in that we split PatentSafe functionality into modules, so you can have cheaper licenses for people who just want to read, or people who just want to submit and sign stuff, etc. We have assigned “points” values to these functions, and customers buy a certain number for their system which gives them a lot of flexibility.

Sometimes we’re asked about concurrent pricing but that request generally comes from an IT dept who are (quite reasonably) looking for ease of administration and don’t realise every user is going to be setup (automatically or otherwise) with a PatentSafe account anyway. Concurrent licensing wouldn’t help anyone in our use case.

We do have a mix of perpetual and rental options in our licensing structure; this accommodates customers who have capital and want the reassurance of owning something (generally larger more established customers) as well as making enterprise-grade solutions attainable to companies who might either be short of capital (being VC funded and at the end of a round) or unsure of their growth curve.

We don’t do anything silly in terms of copy protection; it just adds to pain for the users, and ultimately support pain for us! We don’t even lock a system to a particular number of users – PatentSafe just points out how many users you have and we trust our customers to have that many licenses. We also don’t charge for test servers, although we do make a small additional support charge if you want production-level support for an additional server.

I guess we are unusual in that we’re a records system which is intended to go into court at some point, so we can trust our users to do the right thing in terms of having the right number of licenses. This level of trust makes everything easier, and interestingly means users are more trustworthy back – in all the years I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a reason to be worried that a customer may be exceeding their entitlement.

I know some software companies view having a complex licensing structure as a sales tool but I’ve never found it all that attractive. We’re providing and supporting a tool which will benefit a customer’s organisation, and the question is how to fairly measure the value we provide and hence should be compensated for. We’ve found the easiest and most reliable way to do that is count up how many scientists we’ve freed from the drudgery of the Bound Paper Lab Notebook, so that’s how we price the system. Simple, transparent, predictable – and fair.

Interestingly treating our customers like adults means they act like adults; and the relief expressed in the sales cycle when the realise we’re straightforward to deal with is quite gratifying! I continue to remain befuddled as to why more companies can’t have understandable pricing schemes – I can’t see how complexity helps the vendors or the customers.

There’s some seriously interesting times ahead for all of us and being able to have a separate corporate voice will hopefully make it easier for me to engage thoughtfully without having to consider the implications of what I write from a company branding perspective.

I’m sure writing them is difficult.

But answering them is deeply frustrating – it’s being forced to have a one-way conversation about something where you really need to have a chat, which is much more my natural style.

I remember once I turned up to a Government research establishment and was told “We can’t tell you what we do, or anything about how we work. In fact, the people in this room can’t tell you anything at all. So just tell us what you do, and show us your stuff”. Which was painful, but at least the audience gave some (non-verbal) feedback.

Guess I’d better get back to it – although I think my car might need washing, and there are some other chores to do. Or I might just poke myself with a sharp stick or something.

The first few paragraphs really hit home:

In the on-premise enterprise software world, I have seen many software implementations go awry despite ballooning implementation expenditures. Customers never see their ROI until many years into the implementation, by which time they are so deep into upgrades, manpower turnover, shrinking IT budgets, IT organizational fiefdom – you get the picture – that ROI is the last thing on their mind.

As the customer struggles, the software vendor bears very little risk. The company has pocketed the license dollars and issued the press release on the customer acquisition.

With SaaS, the tables are turned. The SaaS software vendors (to their own detriment) have perpetuated this notion that, with SaaS, implementation will be effortless. But as we all know, enterprise software implementation is much more than just installing the software. Vendors must work harder to reduce deployment cost and improve ROI for their customers. Here’s how.

There’s two components of SaaS – where the software runs, and how the client pays the vendor. In this post I’m going to focus on how the vendor gets paid because it forces some interesting changes in vendor behaviour.

A traditional software sale goes something like this:

• The hero salesperson goes in, does a magnificent sales job convincing the client that the package is wonderful and the vendor is deeply committed to success.
• Customer issues Purchase Order and our hero salesperson exits stage left, pocketing his commission as he goes.
• The vendor’s implementation team are then left to fulfill the commitments the salesperson made, within the sometimes very considerable constraints of budget, time, and technical feasibility (constraints that seldom bother the salesperson!).
• In most cases the implementation effort is a matter of containing the damage rather than achieving something positive, and is the principle reason why there’s so little trust between customers and vendors.

Meanwhile, the customer’s business has stumped up a large capital sum in the hope of achieving some return at some point in the future based on the salesperson’s promise. All the risk is on the customer’s side at this point, because they’ve got an awful lot more invested than the vendor.

If you think about it, this is nuts. The vendor is selling an intangible – there’s no justification for a large up-front capital sum except to fit into the vendor’s existing financial model and sales compensation plan. Why can’t the customer pay for value received as it’s received?

I suspect the current state of affairs is just a matter of tradition, software companies have until now been able to get away with it – they haven’t needed to wean themselves off the up-front capital sum. Now capital is much more constrained so things are changing and customers are expecting to pay as they receive value.

Aside from making the finances easier, what’s really interesting is that rental now means a shared risk between the customer and the vendor – if the customer doesn’t get a return they won’t renew. That makes for much more open and honest conversations, and importantly from the vendor’s side, there’s a lot more learning going on – you really do have their attention. Chances are the vendor will need to change internally to respond to the new demands of this “Shared risk” approach – although one might wonder why it took this long to start caring about the customer’s outcomes.

Amphora started offering rental-type pricing for PatentSafe from the start, and I’m sure it’s one of the reasons why our products are some of the easiest ELNs to get going with, and deliver ROI with reasonable certainty. In addition, we’re wired up internally to ensure we learn as much as possible – we have a board-level position of “Director of Customer Relations” and the salesforce report into her which means one person has control over the entire customer experience from first touch to ROI realisation.

I should say that not everyone takes the rental-style option – I guess probably 50% of our customers rent in some way or another, Vs outright purchase. Getting so much of our revenue this way really forces us to pay attention and ensure the customer gets the business benefits we sold them – because if they don’t they will cancel! Our contracts also have short notice periods which means we never take anyone for granted, a deliberate decision on our part – it means we catch problems early.

Some customers don’t like this partnership approach – they’d rather buy the software and take responsibility for ROI themselves, taking the view that they know their organisation better than we do. Which is perfectly fine – some customers are amazingly professional and we just watch in awe. Other customers sometimes need a little help

I guess the point is traditional software pricing means that a successful project is mainly the customer’s problem. Rental/SaaS-style pricing means both parties interests are aligned.

From the vendor’s perspective this is hard work but it makes you a better company in the end – better products, better services, better (and more ethical) sales. Yes you lose the big upfront windfall of outright purchase, but if you aren’t needing to artificially inflate your short term earnings and can manage your business for the longer term, that’s not a problem.

Yet another way in which being privately held is an advantage, I guess!

They can’t seem to discern a pattern – we don’t even know what prompts them to come to us. But there’s been a seriously noticeable jump, from many different countries, and varying industries. Interestingly we’d expect this time of year (holiday time) to be relatively quiet, and what with the “Current economic climate” we were expecting things to be even quieter.

Either someone somewhere in Amphora did some pretty clever marketing without knowing it (Gold Star, whoever you are!) or perhaps the ELN market has finally reached critical mass.

Interesting, very interesting….

(if you do decide to email in – we’d love to talk to you about how we might be able to help you – mind telling us why you decided to contact us? )

We use a lot of Open Source components in our products, and I know we’re not alone.

There are vendors who are very committed to a specific platform – Windows (and associated libraries, APIs etc.), Oracle, and so on. Those will almost certainly have some Open Source components in them, but not much.

There are other vendors – Amphora (my company) and Rescentris are two that I know of – who have built on top of an Open Source stack. We do have some proprietary components but where there’s an Open Source alternative we use that.

Why?

• The Open Source stuff just works better (and you can fix it if it isn’t).
• Support is better.
• Licensing issues go away (of course you have to abide by the Open Source license, but that’s not a problem as long as you check everything before the developers start using it).
• It is dramatically cheaper for our customers to deploy. No expensive additional Windows Server or Oracle licenses (unless you want to use those of course – we can support them if you prefer).
• We have much more latitude in deployment options. We can bundle our product in a variety of ways and on different platforms, which we wouldn’t be able to do if we were locked to a specific commercial platform. You can get PatentSafe as everything from SaaS, to an embedded device, to a traditional “Install this on your own server” software product.

A few years ago we got raised eyebrows about our platform choices (“We will only consider applications written in .Net”) but that’s not been an issue for a long time. Everyone assumes that the components we’ve assembled into the solution will work and we’re responsible for the overall performance of that – what bits we’ve chosen seldom get discussed.

From what I can see, Open Source starts at the bottom of the stack – the OS, generally – and is gradually moving up (Database, Application Server, some applications). Every commercial vendor needs to keep an eye on what value they are bringing compared to what’s provided by the community.

As an aside, we don’t consider ourselves to be a “Software Vendor”. We solve a business problem and it just so happens we deliver our expertise as some software which implements a “best in class” process. But we don’t consider we’re charging for “software” – we get paid for our expertise and how we deploy that to help customers solve their problem.

What that means is that as the software environment changes (and quite probably Open Source gets further up the stack) that’s not something that threatens our identity. I know some vendors (particularly those locked to proprietary platforms) aren’t so lucky, and I wonder how they will fare as the Open Source community begins to provide more and more of the “ELN” system.

They are on the Amphora web site but I think it is more useful to have them on SlideShare.

The project is on GitHub – here’s the project’s GitHub page.

The checker script is a completely separate implementation of the signature and repository code, and is a useful way for anyone – Amphora customer or not – to check that things are OK with their data.

An important part of PatentSafe’s value is that it creates an open repository which you can read and take in to court without needing any additional software from Amphora. Everything is completely open as standard, no need for a complicated export step, or any software except a PDF reader, a text reader, and OpenSSL. The open release of the checker script is just part of this.

We only press release once the customer has been through pilot, deployed, and determined they are indeed happy users of PatentSafe. So we tend to press release rather later than some, but it’s all solid stuff.

In addition, we don’t press release everyone but where it’s interesting we will ask the customer if they are prepared to do so. The interesting thing about Solidus is they are a small (ish) company with big-company problems – specifically they need an ELN which ties together their multiple sites – which makes the PatentSafe Starter Pack ideal for them.

The pretty version is on PRWeb here.

Solidus Bioscience Protect their Research and Improve Efficiency With Amphora’s PatentSafe Solution

Biotechnology and contract research company Solidus Bioscience Inc have successfully implemented Amphora’s PatentSafe solution to replace their bound lab notebooks. Solidus are using PatentSafe as a fully electronic lab notebook, with digital signatures. Not only does this fit more efficiently into today’s laboratories but it also allows them to partition and search their data simply and effectively, saving significant time previously spent on laborious manual searches and compilation of reports.

Cheyenne, WY (PRWEB) April 16, 2009 – Amphora Research Systems is pleased to announce that Solidus Bioscience Inc. has implemented PatentSafe for their e-notebook initiative. Solidus, with Research Labs in both New York and California, currently offers an in vitro toxicity screening service that determines compound and metabolite toxicity using a novel platform that supports arrays of miniaturized 3D cell cultures and metabolizing enzymes. Solidus has opted for Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack option, which is targeted specifically at startup companies and small biotechs, to document contract studies and new product development.

With their research team split between the East and West coast, Solidus were keen to implement a solution which would help their scientists to co-ordinate and collaborate effectively. Having access to all the research information and project reports via the secure PatentSafe server is something that has allowed Solidus to work more effectively as a team.

Being able to put our experiments straight into PatentSafe has made life much easier for the scientists, giving us back the time we used to spend on cutting and sticking into our paper notebooks. Protecting our intellectual property is very important to us, and we feel that PatentSafe helps us document our work more efficiently and completely.

Solidus carries out a mix of contract research and testing for client companies and internal discovery work of their own. Using PatentSafe’s simply configured metadata it is now easy for the researchers to quickly access work done for a particular company or for a development project by everyone in the company simultaneously.

Jessica Ryan, a leading research scientist at Solidus said “Being able to put our experiments straight into PatentSafe has made life much easier for the scientists, giving us back the time we used to spend on cutting and sticking into our paper notebooks. Protecting our intellectual property is very important to us, and we feel that PatentSafe helps us document our work more efficiently and completely.”

She continued, “The PatentSafe Starter Pack was ideal for us. The small financial outlay meant that we were able to move quickly from deciding the PatentSafe software was a good fit for our business needs, to implementing it and seeing the benefits we were after.”

Having the option run the software remotely on a secure hosted server meant that Solidus did not need to worry about setting up and maintaining additional IT infrastructure. Deployment and training was simple and painless.

Allison Coles, CSO and co-founder of Amphora said, “Contract Research Organizations (CROs) have a particular set of problems. Not only do they want to be able to search, share and secure their work, but they need to be able to divide it simply, so each client can have a copy of their own work. Previously CROs would need to run a set of notebooks for each client company. Using PatentSafe it’s simple for them to pull together the all the relevant work for each company, at the end of the contract, or whenever you need to. This removes a lot of time consuming admin from the researchers and lets them work in a more efficient way.”

The Starter Pack Subscription of PatentSafe is specifically aimed at biotechs with up to 10 scientists. The Starter pack offering brings the Enterprise-class capabilities of PatentSafe to companies who find themselves with Enterprise-scale problems but until now haven’t had the infrastructure or financial ability to do anything but struggle on with the Paper Lab Notebook. Now they can have a quick, easy, and cost effective solution that can grow with them and their success.

I was interested in this HBS blog post on how smaller companies are winning against larger ones these days because they are perceived to be more stable and trustworthy.

The gap of confidence between small companies and big ones is growing. We used to rely on the security of big companies. That’s why we worked for them. And hired them. And put our money in them.

But with the virtual collapse of AIG, Lehman, Citibank, GM, Chrysler, and many more — now even GE is in trouble — all that’s changed. Now it’s a risk to do business with the big ones.

We simply don’t trust companies anymore. We trust people. And in big companies, it’s hard to even find a person to trust as we scream “operator” into our telephones only to get transferred to another menu whose options have changed.

That gives small companies a huge advantage… [snip]

…Small companies that aren’t making millions but provide a good living for the people who work in them. Niche companies whose owners are trying to build sustainable businesses they love rather than fast-growing companies they can flip. They have no intention of retiring. They like working in them. And their clients know that. Which is why they have a loyal customer base willing to invest in the relationship… [snip]

…Small companies with low overhead, reliable owners, a small number of committed employees, personal client relationships, and sustainable business models that drive a reasonable profit are the great opportunity of our time.

Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage.

This might be the explanation behind our uptick in business – we’ve not needed to make any cuts and are unlikely to (in fact we’ll probably hire a few more people soon). We can adjust our approach to fit our customer’s circumstances, and we’re unlikely to make any major changes in strategy (e.g. pulling out of a market – we’re happy with our positioning). Compared to what I’m hearing from the larger companies who have ELN offerings – and are reducing their staffing and investment in this area – that’s got to be a good message.

We’re privately held, stable, profitable, and personal – a year ago those traits would have been looked down on but now it seems they’re just what’s needed.

“Earlier in my career, I thought that innovation was solely about technology. If you wanted to address a new market or to increase sales, writing more code was always a good option. Having gained some wisdom and experience over the years, I’ve finally figured out the obvious — that innovation can also take the form of a business model!”

Ohhh yes. Very much so. PatentSafe is one product, one code base, but packaged in different ways to reach different markets who all have the same business problem, but different circumstances…

This still freaks some people out, but it’s a great way to take something Enterprise-class and deliver it to a wide range of organizations.

Interestingly, to the extent we have competition (and we’re pretty focused, so we don’t have much), we’re finding that the business model is the hardest area for people to compete on. Our stuff’s affordable and deployable, and that’s a result of our paying attention to each segment’s individual circumstances.

It takes a mixture of code, marketing, sales, business model, packaging, and a healthy dose of creativity – and it seems to turn out quite well for all concerned

Thinking aloud, we’ve developed a number of nifty apps for our internal use, and I do wonder if there’s an opportunity there for us to make them more widely available.

For example we have a really fun market intelligence and “prospecting” system, which is designed to help us find new people to talk with. Our sales guys love it and it’s paid for itself time and again – if I met you last week, it’s because of this system .

This is system is important enough that I’d not want to sell it to anyone who might compete with us, but if there’s a nice company with a similar “soft” approach to sales it might be a match made in heaven.

(Note we draw a distinction between “Getting new prospects” and “Manage the conversation with existing prospects” which we do in Salesforce.com right now – and whilst Salesforce is expensive, it’s good enough and replacing it right now wouldn’t bring competitive advantage.)

In addition, the next version of our web site will be similarly funky, doing some “Getting to know your readers better” stuff that I haven’t seen in off-the-shelf products. It’ll also feed into the prospecting/CRM system. For us, our web site is a tool to help people decide to call us, and it supports our people-centered sales process – it isn’t meant to make the sale on it’s own. So it makes a lot of sense to hook the web site into our prospect generation process directly at a very intimate level.

Finally we have an internal business management system, but that’s so specific to our way of working that it probably won’t work elsewhere. There’s a reason we needed to write this ourselves, we’ve got specific issues with multiple companies, currencies, etc. which I suspect most people would rather avoid!

So these systems really help us, we could well have something that’s useful for others. However, the problem is not the development of the application, or even the implementation. We can do that easily! Selling/marketing an application into a new market, that’s tough. The Sales Learning Curve is very real, sadly. On the other hand, it’s a great barrier to entry into the ELN market for potential competitors!

So I think we’re stuck with something really useful but don’t know how to take it to more people in a way that makes sense for everyone involved.

The answer might be “Open Source them” but I’m not sure these apps would generate a worthwhile community, and everything I’ve read indicates it’s the community that matters. We might pick up some consulting but I suspect we’ll make more money selling our stuff than helping other people sell theirs – and our market is still growing strongly, despite the changing economy.

For those that care, all of these are Rails applications, and we commit just under one FTE to developing/maintaining them. Although that’s a big investment we work on the principle that we’ve got excellent people in Sales, Customer Care etc. and it’s easier to find good coders to write applications to support them, than it is to find another good sales person (It’s very hard to find a good sales person – I have no idea what’s gone wrong in that “profession” but I’ve more or less given up on it).

As an aside, the Custodian’s Console grew out of an internal project, and it’s gone down really well with our customers. But that’s a product we’re selling to our current market, which we understand well.

Anyway, some things to think about….

However, my inner geek keeps looking at the existing Chemistry ELN products from a technical perspective and thinking:

• They’re mostly based on quite old platforms. Web 2.0 isn’t really making an appearance – this is very traditional enterprise software with all the associated problems.
• I’m not sure what value these really thick clients are adding. Seems like a really expensive and painful way to make Excel harder to use, and are a general support nightmare.
• What’s going to happen when someone takes something like WordPress and adds structures to it?

The more I play with things like WordPress and Rails, the more impressed I am with what can be done with web UIs. And then I bump into things like Metamolecular’s ChemWriter and I think the future will be rather exciting…

The next question is if these solutions will come out of the Open Source community or commercial providers. Having met some of the guys in Academia I suspect it’ll be taking what they’ve done and bending it slightly to the needs of commercial organisations (plus adding support services etc.)

Anyway, hopefully all of this innovation on the front end means more people with the problem our PatentSafe product solves. Which of course is delightful…