Rent-a-supercomputer

LION Bioscience and IBM have announced an agreement to offer subscription-based hosted computing services over the Internet to life sciences companies and interested academic research institutions. Aimed primarily at biotechnology companies undertaking drug-related research, the service could level the playing field for smaller companies versus "Big Pharma," said Anne-Marie Derouault, director of business alliances for IBM Life Sciences."Once you had to have the room, the air-conditioning, now it's hosted in an IBM facility. LION and IBM are changing the game in life sciences and enabling biotech companies to rapidly leverage technology for competitive advantage," said Derouault."Lion has really been trying to market a full suite," said GartnerG2 senior analyst Jonathan Edwards, "but there's been a general souring on bioinformatics as a market, so this deal could be seen as a way to go the other way: 'if you're not going for the full suite, we'll give you something at low cost.'" The Lion–IBM package combines three applications, LION's SRS, which includes text-based biological databases, LION's DiscoveryCenterT repository of relational databases of chemical and toxicological information, and IBM's DiscoveryLink database integration software. The value of the service does not lie in offering new information, explained Dr. Andrea Kreisselmeier, LION's vice president of communications, but in making it all accessible in one place. "Together they allow a researcher to rapidly query over 600 public databases as if they were one database," she said. It is tempting to ask if one couldn't simply achieve the same thing with a graduate student and a Perl script, said Mike Swenson, a senior research analyst with IDC. But he noted one major advantage to outsourcing: "LION will have to keep the wrappers up to date. With so many databases, you could be nearly constantly updating APIs," (application programming interfaces, which allow performing one search in 600 databases)."The larger issue is not so much whether they can pull it off technically. It's a question of market adoption. Will these price points generate a customer base? It's not that nobody's tried a hosted service before," Swenson observed. With the market downturn, several companies who have offered this kind of service, such as DoubleTwist and Entigen (BioNavigator), have already gone out of business. To demonstrate the value of the hosting model, IBM and LION point out that if a company were to build, from the ground-up, an installation comparable to what they're offering, the cost could likely run to several million dollars, including facilities, servers, networking equipment, and software licensing — and the last would be an ongoing charge. In contrast, an annual subscription to the LION–IBM service could cost as little as $40,000 for a stripped-down version of the service, to several-hundred thousand dollars a year for a version that includes DiscoveryLink. "We can offer a set of well-known, well-supported tools that allows researchers to do not the latest, hip thing, but 80 percent of the day-to-day work," said Friedrich von Bohlen, CEO of LION. Swenson cautioned, "But if you still need the other 20%, what does that do to your total costs?" And there are additional considerations, he noted. "What if part of your intellectual property advantage is that you've developed your own algorithms?" Some companies might feel themselves in IP competition with LION's own discovery work, he added.Yet, in a world where researchers are drowning in data, anyone reputable promising better database integration is worth a listen, said Swenson. And academic researchers could be eligible for a discount. "There are possibly more favorable [subscription] figures for academia, we're open to discussions," said Daniel Keesman, CBO of LION. The company would also consider a content exchange, for example, if a lab had its own valuable database it was willing to swap for a subscription, he added.

Rent-a-supercomputer

LION and IBM offering Big Pharma data management to smaller companies and academia.

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