elnblog: Electronic Lab Notebooks

Finding stuff internally Vs externally, and emergence

May 18, 2006 on 11:30 pm | In Industry | No Comments

Andrew McAfee writes in a post about Online Emergence

“When I talk about Enterprise 2.0 with company management teams, industry groups, and executive education students I usually start by asking people to raise their hands if it’s easier for them to find what they want on their company’s Intranet than it is on the public Internet.  ”

Yup - and right now, for scientists using the paper notebook, the situation is even worse, because they can’t even search it. They’re back to 20th-century “browse the library books” - and to add salt the wounds, they probably spend more time creating these records than any of their non-scientist colleagues spend on similar tasks.

This is the PatentSafe sweet spot - it is a real rush to fix such a long-standing problem in 5 minutes :-).

But the really cool thing is that because experiments tend to have something of an in-built structure, we can start to stitch everything together without scientists having to change anything except stop using the Bound Notebook. Which is kind of freaky but once you get the hang of it opens up huge possibilities and becomes tremendously empowering for all involved. We can finally bridge the impedance mismatch between the inherent variation in scientific activity/approach (”Scientists” are often very individual, which is both a delight and a challenge - and I married one) and the need to generate a consistent knowledge base.

Delivering software as an appliance

May 4, 2006 on 9:37 am | In Amphora | No Comments

In this post, Rod Boothby mentions the growing use of Appliances to deliver software - a physical server with the software pre-installed which the customer just plugs into their network.

We have been doing this PatentSafe product for a while, particularly for Pilot projects. With the appliance approach, everyone wins - the customer has near-zero setup costs, we get to deploy onto a standard platform (removing a zillion potential issues), and we can literally have the customer up and running within minutes. We had to write a little web UI so the customer can manage the server from their web browser (shutdown, backup, etc.) but overall it has been pretty easy to put in place.

Most of our customers use the Amphora-supplied server for the Pilot and then move to their own server for production - which can be Windows, Linux or MacOS based. Fortunately the migration from the pilot server is just a matter of copying some files, so the switch is pretty transparent.

We started out using Linux boxes for the appliance but when Apple came out with the Mac Mini we’ve moved to those:

• They’re really small so our installation engineer can bring it with them rather than have it shipped (costing money and hassle).
• We can easily clone/image a disk in MacOS X, most often we end up doing it in a hotel room.
• New machines are readily available - we’ve bought a number in Apple Stores near the client (I dread to think how much we spend with the Apple Store in CambridgeSide).
• MacOS X has all the power and convenience of Unix, with a friendly face - so on the rare occasion that the customer does need to interact with the system directly, it isn’t too scary.
• Because PatentSafe is a web app, the customer never knows they are using a Mac server - there are no compatibility issues, even if they are wall-to-wall Windows.

This is working well for us and our customers - so well in fact that a number have kept their Mac Minis to use as production servers, and one has even switched to Macs! :-).

With VMWare’s recent re-alignment of their product line we’re also starting to offer VMWare machines as “appliances”. So where a customer doesn’t want to have a Mac Mini we will ship them a VMWare image which is a Linux-based PatentSafe server. This has pretty much the same effect as shipping a physical server (in terms of ease of setup), but obviously the customer needs to supply their own hardware.

The use of appliances - particularly for pilots - and a carefully tailored commercial proposition - has made a massive difference in Amphora’s business. We’re now acquiring as many customers in a month as we used to do in a year with an “old style” approach, because the barriers to entry are so much lower. I can heartily recommend it to anyone except our competitors!

P.S. whilst the Mac Mini does exactly what we need, we don’t need the little remote control that comes with the newer ones. I’d welcome suggestions about what to do with the little collection of remotes that are gathering in a corner of our machine room.