Yipppeee we can announce a new customer.

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 remember thinking when the financial crisis hit that we were very lucky it happened when we were still young enough to remember the earlier, leaner times. We haven’t really grown much fat, and the essence of our plan for coping with the economy is “Remember what it was like in 2004? Let’s do that again.”. Which seems to be working!

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.

 

From Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances:

“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 :-)

 

There’s a good post on selling by products, on the always-insightful 37 signals blog.

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….

 

The “Chemistry-centric” front end bit of the ELN problem isn’t really our gig – although we’re happy to play our part in enabling the deployment of such products to Chemists whilst we keep everyone else in the organisation happy. So we see a lot of Chemistry ELNs but we don’t really have much interest in them apart from the fact that some of our users use them.

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…

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