I’ll be speaking at this conference in Munich in a couple of weeks, if anyone wants to meet up, let me know.
We’ve updated the PatentSafe Repository Checker script, and importantly released it under an Open Source license (the GPL) which means anyone can check the integrity of a PatentSafe repository.
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.
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.
Feb 162009
This sort of thing upsets me…
- Customer looks at ELNs, gets vendors in to chat to.
- Customer likes what we do.
- Competitor goes in very aggressively making promises they can’t keep and offering a “free trial”. Salesperson makes no effort to understand the customer’s needs, just keeps nodding and pushing the trial.
- Customer tries free trial. Vendor unable/unwilling to provide any support – they don’t understand the customer’s problems anyway.
- Product doesn’t work for the scientists (as we predicted) and promises made aren’t kept.
- Having tried one, customer’s scientists decide they don’t need an ELN.
The end result is that a whole bunch of scientists are stuck using Paper Notebooks when they could be benefiting from a better system. But the purchasing and sales process got in the way. I expect the Sales person got a commission but that’s the only good that came out of this. This is scorched earth policies.
All ELNs are not created equal. All ELN companies are not equal. We do different things in different ways, and have different strengths (and weaknesses).
As an aside, our sales people can’t make unsustainable promises (and in fact, you’re more likely to hear uncomfortable truths), and their compensation scheme is heavily biased to successful deployments and happy customers. I suspect our compensation scheme is “highly unusual” though and most companies would struggle to put something like it in place.
So anyway, I’m a little frustrated – perhaps I am niave but I’d like to think that we and our fellow vendors have unique viewpoints and capabilities, and it’s in the sales/purchasing process that we help the prospective customer understand what we can do for them and how we fit. Hopefully the right customers buy the right products.
In this case the sales process has created a lose/lose/lose situation. Which is pretty sad really…. and I don’t know what to do about it. Having a more aggressive salesforce isn’t something I’m prepared to consider – makes us as bad as everyone else. Similarly, free pilots don’t work – you don’t get enough attention within the customer organization unless you charge something (even a token amount).
Time to go and write some code, for the therapeutic benefits if nothing else. That prospect will no doubt come back into play in a year or so, and we’ll hopefully engage with them then…
It was the fashion a few years ago to refer to ELNs as “ERP” for research, and that’s a business model which some of the larger vendors have embraced with glee. A broad range of product offerings (acquire or build as needed), an aggressive sales force, confident marketing, and off we go! You too can reap the rewards (and these contracts are obscenely profitable).
I’ve watched the lifecycle of these large projects, and the success rate is abysmal. They really are the ERP of research – warts and all. The optimistic customer and slightly smug vendor are seen two years later much quieter – and the project manager has often moved on, leaving the debris to someone else.
Unfortunately the ELN market isn’t large enough to get the kind of attention that ERP does, so getting “Lessons Learned” is tough – although we do try in the workshops with give, and I know that John Trigg at Phase Four has a lot of good stuff to say too.
It’s interesting that the people pushing for ERP-style projects come from the vendor side in some way or another. I don’t think they are deliberately pushing something that doesn’t work, it’s just that they only see the one success, not the many failures – or indeed, the many successes of very simple, effective solutions which might not even involve an outside vendor.
Anyway, I find reading about ERP failures pretty useful when considering how to run effective ELN projects. One good example is this blog post on ZDNet:When will we learn?
With reference to Amphora’s products and approach – this is one reason why we’ve focused very tightly on a specific problem, delivering a solution which can be deployed without too much pain or risk. It takes discipline and I know a lot of people think we’re mad, but the results speak for themselves I think.
In the current economic climate, focus and simplicity are suddenly back in fashion, which I guess means there’s always a silver lining….
