Life in the Clouds

Today, the Applied Biosystems division of Life Technologies announced their partnership with us (Geospiza) to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use cloud-computing technologies to help customers manage data from advanced genomic analysis platforms.

This news is significant for several reasons.

First, as noted by our President, Rob Arnold, in Xconomy, this is the first time a leading gene sequencing company has agreed to offer the sequencing instrument, the consumable chemicals needed to run experiments, and the software needed to sort through and make sense of the data, in a single package and run the software under a SaaS model.

Second, through this news, and other activities, we are proactively addressing one of the major challenges for Next Generation Sequencing. Specifically, that the costs and time for purchasing, deploying, and maintaining IT systems to support NGS data management and analysis are simply out of reach for the vast majority of research groups that can benefit from these technologies. Presently, the groups making the greatest progress with NGS have advanced bioinformatics and IT support. However, if these technologies are going to truly meet their promise of revolutionizing genomics, the numbers of scientists utilizing NGS needs to increase. All over the country (and world) medical researchers, microbiologists, plant biologists, and other scientists have interesting samples and new ideas for which NGS experiments will provide amazing discoveries, but they can only follow through on those ideas if they can work with their data in a reasonable cost effective way.

Finally, today's news is gratifying because it validates one of Geospiza's important early technology decisions. Cloud-computing, also called "Software as a Service" (SaaS) is not new to Geospiza. When we started in 1997, we made an important decision to develop our platform as a web-based system. We've been working with web technology and Internet-based services right from the beginning. Back then we used the term ASP (Application Service Provider) instead of SaaS, but we have had clients effectively using our systems this way for many years. Our long experience with cloud computing has prepared us to meet the new challenges created by NGS and we look forward to working with Applied Biosystems on the AWS platform to extend the number of options we can provide to our customers, helping to lower their computing costs, and working to enable their science.

For more information visit:

Geospiza Cloud
Press Release

FinchTalks where SaaS is discussed:

Have we been deluged?
Three Themes from AGBT and ABRF Part III: The IT Problem
Next Gen-Omics
Focus on Next Gen Sequencing
Closing 2008