However, we’re also conscious that sometimes we don’t portray ourselves in the best light especially when other people are press releasing a small pilot in one area of a company as a “Global Rollout”. We’re probably the largest vendor in our space by a large margin but you wouldn’t believe that from the hype sometimes!

So we’ve started to look at press releasing some of our customer wins. We’ve made a bunch of people happy and I guess there’s no harm in telling the world sometimes….

As part of that a press release went out last night regarding Glycomar’s use of PatentSafe, particularly the PatentSafe starter pack which is ideal for their circumstances.

Without further ado, here’s the press release which pretty much says it all….

Amphora’s PatentSafe Solution Selected by Glycomar

Amphora Research Systems , a key provider of electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) products for the biotech industry, announces the purchase of Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack for researchers at Glycomar - a marine biotechnology company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialisation of new anti-inflammatory drug candidates based on the glycobiology of marine organisms. Glycomar is using Amphora’s PatentSafe solution as a fully-electronic ELN, with digital signatures for legal patent evidence. By using PatentSafe not only do they create secure records for patents but also they have the benefit of a searchable, sharable repository of the company’s research.

(PRWEB) April 18, 2008 — Amphora Research Systems (http://www.amphora-research.com), a key provider of electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) products for the biotech industry, announces the purchase of Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack for researchers at Glycomar - a marine biotechnology company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialisation of new anti-inflammatory drug candidates based on the glycobiology of marine organisms.

Glycomar is using Amphora’s PatentSafe solution as a fully-electronic ELN, with digital signatures for legal patent evidence. By using PatentSafe not only do they create secure records for patents but also they have the benefit of a searchable, sharable repository of the company’s research.

April Macleod from Glycomar said “Being a small Biotech, most Electronic Lab Notebook solutions were too involved and expensive, but Amphora’s PatentSafe Starter Pack option is perfect for our situation and can easily meet our needs as we grow”.

Simon Coles, CTO and co-founder of Amphora, explains: “There’s a real need for a practical, approachable ELN solution for the hundreds of small Biotechs who need the significant productivity gains that come with an ELN, with full protection for their patents. Most ELN solutions on the market were built to serve the needs of Big Pharma, but the PatentSafe Starter Pack is focused exactly on the smaller Biotech companies. We have designed the system so that it is a “plug & play” set up, we were able to get Glycomar up and running on the system within a couple of hours. Because of the way PatentSafe fitted into the scientists’ existing working patterns, rolling out the system was smooth and pain free for both parties.”

Thanks to PatentSafe, scientists can work using whatever tools suit their research needs best and still collaborate easily on their projects. Scientists no longer have to ‘cut and stick’ computer printouts into their traditional bound laboratory notebook, saving typically between 15 minutes to an hour per day. Furthermore, the entire PatentSafe notebook can be searched and shared with colleagues and all work is fully protected for patent and IP purposes. PatentSafe is quick to learn and affordable to deploy, and can be used in conjunction with traditional paper-based methods or in fully electronic mode using secure digital signatures.

###

I was interviewed by IQPC’s Pharma IQ Community about this - you can read the full interview on their site, but here’s the highlights…. the questions were pretty insightful and forced me to write down some stuff I don’t think I’ve written elsewhere (I’m not too good at writing stuff down unless I have to!).

The interview was conducted by Emma Cobbledick, Editor, The Pharma IQ Community Newsletter

E: Hi Simon, thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. It’d be great if you could let our readers know a little bit about Amphora’s history to start us off.

S: Amphora grew out of a consulting engagement with Eastman Kodak in 1996. Kodak identified some specific business issues which required a fully-electronic ELN to be used by their scientists, enterprise-wide (and at the time Kodak’s R&D was huge). The company I was working for at the time were engaged by Kodak and I was the project manager. Things grew from there - with Kodak’s encouragement we turned the project into a product which we sold to a few other larger companies, and then in 2003 we did a Management Buyout and released a new generation of products more suited to today’s users and technology platforms. Amphora is based in the US & UK, and we have customers all around the world.

E: You recently received the Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Penetration Leadership, presented each year to the company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing market share within their industry. What criteria were you assessed on?

S: You can read the award citation for the detail, but to summarise they were looking at how Amphora was executing in the market place: our products and their focus on customer needs, how we take products to market, and the outcome of that in terms of market share. It isn’t just about the current situation; they are also looking at how we’re positioned for the future.

E: And which of these in particular did the judges think Amphora really excelled at?

S: We seem to have hit on the right product set and sales approach which allow us to solve the Lab Notebook problem quickly and efficiently in a wide variety of organisations, for a price they can afford and delivered in a package they can deploy. Turns out that’s been one of the biggest problems for the ELN market as a whole and is one of the reasons why things are only now really beginning to take off. Interestingly, what we’ve found actually works is entirely different to what we all thought (myself included) back in the late 90’s.

E: What would you say was unique about Amphora products insofar as the customer is concerned?

S: From an end-user perspective, we try very hard to stay out of the user’s way. The science is the focus, and ideally the notebook should take a back seat allowing the scientist to work however they wish. We’ve got some users who don’t even realise they are using PatentSafe, which we’re very proud of.

From an IT and administration perspective, we tend to build very open, scalable systems and we’ve spent a lot of time engineering out some of the problems that cause issues in the field. We’ve got a lot of smaller customers and they don’t have the time or experience to tend complex IT systems, and once you’ve built something that can survive in that environment then that really helps the larger companies control their TCO too.

From a legal perspective we’ve spent an awful lot of time on our Patent Evidence Creation & Preservation system and we feel it is uniquely suited to the task. This is one area where a lot of diverse experience is hugely important, which we’re fortunate to have.

E: How do you view your position in the ELNs market and has the award changed that at all?

S: We’ve always been very focused on solving the “Replace the Bound Notebook” problem; sometimes that means our products will be used alone, sometimes in conjunction with other “ELN” systems from other suppliers. So I’d view our position as solving a particularly tricky part of the ELN problem space, and we are delighted to be able to work with other vendors where our customers need some discipline-specific functionality on the desktop.

I’m not sure the award has changed much in reality, although historically we haven’t spent a lot of time tooting our own horn - in a lot of early markets all you see is lots of loud marketing fluff, almost as a substitute for making sales. We’ve preferred to focus on figuring out how to solve the problem and making the sales, gaining experience all the time. What the award has done has drawn attention to that - I suspect people had trouble figuring out what we were about before, because we weren’t doing the normal marketing thing.

E: If you were to offer advice to a company considering getting involved in ELNs, what would be the first thing you’d tell them?

S: The first thing I’d do is stop using the phrase “ELN” to describe your project; the term is terribly ambiguous and means many different things to different people.

Before you get involved in products and vendors, take a clear look at what you are trying to do. Try to keep it as simple as possible; a major cause of ELN project failure is people get distracted by all the wonderful possibilities that you could do in eR&D nirvana and they end up with something that they can’t afford, or if they can afford it they can’t roll it out.

Most successful ELN projects are surprisingly simple and will build on that initial success over a number of years. “Conventional wisdom” about what “should” be in a “proper” ELN seems to be based on the wishes & dreams of a few pundits, rather than on business need. Unfortunately, project managers seldom get credit for solving the business problem in a quick & simple way!

John Trigg (of PhaseFour Informatics) and I have been doing a workshop on ELN Project Implementation for a number of years - I do it as a non-commercial hobby. There’s a number of concepts which have stood the test of time which really help people focus on what their problem is and how they can increase their capabilities with minimal risk and cost going forward.

E: Sounds like sensible advice, what’s the most interesting development that you know of, in terms of the ELN industry and ELN usage?

S: I think there is finally a consensus that you can’t get a single “ELN” system which will meet the needs of everyone in an organisation. Science is a huge field which is constantly changing and there’s no way a single product can intimately support each group of users. So we’re seeing many more “ELN Systems” being deployed (with great success) which comprise more than one product called an “ELN”, focused on different groups of users. Customers are seeing that this approach is cost effective and lower risk, and vendors are increasingly seeing this isn’t a zero sum game - indeed, they will suffer in the market if they don’t focus on their strength and work well with others.

E: And what do you think is the biggest obstacle on the road to a paperless lab today?

S: Complexity. This is a hard problem space and one that’s very prone to being over-engineered into an unjustifiable wish-list of functionality and organisational initiatives. Combine that with a healthy dose of marketing and an enthusiastic sales person, and you have a recipe for project failure. Discipline is the key to success in ELN projects.

• Money is tight
• Productivity is all-important
• The need for an ELN is perhaps greater than in a more established company
• Their IT infrastructure is often a bit ad-hoc, but their use of computers in research (e.g. on the scientist’s desktops) is often very advanced (making a Bound Notebook particularly inappropriate)

Boosting researcher productivity very early in the life of startup delivers significantly greater benefit than doing it in the later stages of a company’s life:

• The first few employees are often the “Key” people in any organization. Their time is disproportionately valuable.
• If the existing employees can get more done, it means bringing on extra people can be delayed. Which means you reduce cash drain, reduce risk, and can afford to be more selective about who you bring on.
• When you do bring on people, the existing body of work (both the results themselves, but also the procedures used) is tremendously valuable for training.

Startups are often based in multiple places, and there seems to be a growing trend for the company not to have a central office at all - we’ve got a number of customers who have employees at different research institutes. Having a single, Internet-accessible (but secure!) is crucial not only for collaboration but also getting properly witnessed records for patent purposes.

And of course, getting decent notebooks in from the start makes investors much more comfortable - progress is easier to see, and they know that IP is being generated and can be defended. When the major asset from any of these endeavors is the IP, it really helps investors to know that it is all written up safely!

So we’ve come up with the PatentSafe Starter Pack which is a subscription offering (which makes it easier on cash flow) delivered in a box (well, sometimes two boxes) which are just plugged in and you can start working. Alternatively, it is available as a hosted offering if you’ve got multiple sites.

The starter pack will produce both paper or electronic records (keeping the lawyers happy) but the scientists can of course work electronically regardless (keeping the scientists happy) and everything is available in single, searchable database.

It has taken us a while to get here, and coming up with a way to deliver PatentSafe at an affordable price and packaged in a way that can be quickly deployed has been quite a challenge - perhaps more of a challenge than our larger deployments (and we do have some very large multi-national deployments). Fortunately we’ve got some experience from our low-cost pilot program this is to some extent an offshoot of that.

Speaking of pilots, the economics of this program are such that we’re not going to offer a pilot; we’re going to offer a money-back guarantee instead. Our pilots tend to go straight to purchase anyway, so it seems a little silly to offer one in this case, especially as the cost of the pilot would be more than the first year’s subscription.

The Starter Pack is a different product from our normal PatentSafe offering, in that it is restricted to a small number of users, available in certain geographies, and we provide the server etc. This keeps our costs low which is why we can offer it at such a low price. Larger and more established companies will find the restrictions we’ve had to put in place to get the costs down will mean the Starter Pack doesn’t meet their needs - which is fine, that’s why we have the normal PatentSafe offering.

Because this is a very keenly-priced package and there’s been a lot of discussion about why we should do this (particularly from our Sales force!). Fortunately we’re privately held so it ultimately comes down to “Because we think it is a good idea”, but for the curious, this is some of the rationale:

• Just because you’re small doesn’t mean you haven’t got an ELN problem, so there’s a definite need to be met. Because of our product architecture, cost structure etc. we’re one of the few vendors who can sensibly serve smaller companies.
• Working with smaller companies is to some extent an investment - some of them will grow or be bought, and if we serve them well they will buy more from us.
• Smaller companies are an awful lot of fun to work with, there’s lots of energy and enthusiasm. Watching them grow is a real pleasure - we’ve known some of our customers when they were all in one room, and now they’ve got whole buildings full of people.
• People move around an awful in the Biotech workforce, that we’re getting an awful lot of customers from word-of-mouth recommendations. We literally are finding people who call us as they are going through the process of setting up a company, or call us when they realize their new job doesn’t come with an ELN.

So it should be an awful lot of fun… and I am sure we’ll meet a lot of interesting people along the way!

PS: If you are interested in the starter pack, you need to make contact with one of our sales people (fill out this form) and if you meet the criteria they can make an application on your behalf - if that’s approved we’ll put one in the post!

PPS: Yes, this program is inspired by Sun’s Startup Essentials program.

Hopefully the ensuing conversation will raise the general level of awareness of the issues involved. Ideally we’ll be able to turn the content up and marketing-speak down….

Couple of representative links: Ars Technica’s guide on how to steal an election (scary reading), and Scott Adams’s tongue-in-cheek but thought provoking post on whether it really matters anyway (which I suspect will offend the easily offended).

If you attended the workshops and would like a copy of the the presentations and handouts, email me.

My presentation on ELN integration techniques from the IQPC conference is now available on the main Amphora web site, here.

One additional request - if you’re currently running an ELN project, why not start a blog and let us know how you’re getting on?

The standard encryption mechanism used by Oracle’s (Profile, Products, Articles) database products can be easily circumvented, according to a German security researcher who last week published details on a number of unpatched security”

Ouch. Not what you want to see, bad for Oracle, bad for customers. Not strictly an ELN issue, but it is a good example of one of the reasons why I think you want a very simple, very boring, stand alone PECP (Patent Evidence Creation & Preservation) system:

• Simple systems are easy to see if they’re working OK, so if there’s a problem you can see it quickly - and less specialist skills are involved.
• There’s less to go wrong with a simple system.
• Because the system is standalone and not used for other purposes, there’s less chance that unrelated “events” will compromised your patent evidence.

The business requirements of PECP systems are comparatively simple. The hard part is developing & deploying systems which are robust in the real world. That’s much harder, and it is much less of an IT problem than people think. In fact, a reliable PECP system will probably violate a whole load of “IT best practice”.

Hashes are an important part of any Digital Signature scheme, and SHA-1 is one of the more popular (and until now well-respected) Hash algorithms. Any flaw found in the hashing algorithm is a serious problem for any ELN system that uses Digital Signatures to prove a record has not been changed. As Jon Callas, PGP’s CTO, puts it: ‘It’s time to walk, but not run, to the fire exits. You don’t see smoke, but the fire alarms have gone off.’

So this isn’t a crisis - if you were using digital signatures yesterday, they haven’t suddenly become worthless today. But it is a reminder that nothing lasts forever, especially in Cryptography. Flaws are found in algorithms, computers get faster, and soon it costs a mere $1m to forge the Digital Signature on the document that proves you have the rights to a Blockbuster drug. Picking a “better” algorithm or longer key isn’t going to help - erosion of Cryptographic tools is a fact of life.

Any Evidence system needs to have a series of controls and capabilities to show that a document has been unaltered. Digital Signatures are one of the tools you would use in such a system (we use them in our PatentSafe product) but they shouldn’t be the only thing you rely on. Indeed PatentSafe has a whole series of checks & balances in it and if you run the system properly, even if it turned out the signature algorithm was worthless, you’d still be able to use your records in court.

Unfortunately there are some vendors who are relying on Cryptography alone to prove authenticity. Listening to their marketing, they’re treating the technology as a silver bullet - “Buy this magic, and all your concerns are over”. This has always made me intensely uncomfortable, especially given the timescales that our customers expect to be able to use the records they put into our systems. Fortunately given the level of concern over Electronic Records for patents, few customers have actually implemented such systems - the laggards have been proven correct!

It is possible to do perfectly safe, effective, Electronic Records systems for Patent Evidence Creation and Preservation. Unfortunately, it is a lot harder than just implementing some Cryptographic magic, as the demise of SHA-1 shows. My problem is that it is much easier (and more seductive) to talk about apparently sexy technology rather than the real (but less exciting) issues around good electronic records systems