InnaPhase Continues to Deliver
By Joe Peden, Vice President, Marketing and Product Management, InnaPhase Corporation At PITTCON® 2003 in Orlando, InnaPhase Corporation showcased — to rave reviews — a prototype of their purpose-built Newton LIMS solution for pharmaceutical analytical development and quality control (see SCI Laboratory Informatics 2003, "At last someone has done it!"). InnaPhase made the aggressive promise that they would release this revolutionary solution before the end of the year, to the disbelief of many in the LIMS industry. InnaPhase met the self-imposed deadline and released Newton in December 2003, followed in January 2004 by the official product launch and celebration at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where InnaPhase is headquartered. By March 2004, InnaPhase announced its first order for Newton.
Figure 1. Newton LIMS Batch Review
Indeed, Newton was not the only new LIMS solution released by InnaPhase last year. In June 2003, InnaPhase launched Galileo LIMS — the first major laboratory information management system designed to address the specific needs of pharmaceutical companies performing in-vitro studies as part of their drug development program. Newton and Galileo joined Watson LIMS, an industry-leading LIMS for bioanalytical laboratories, as part of InnaPhase's Pharma LIMS Suite.
InnaPhase's business strategy of building "purpose-built" LIMS solutions — designed from the ground up to address the unique needs of vertical markets — has flown in the face of the industry norm. By focusing exclusively on vertical markets, InnaPhase designs LIMS with as much as 90 percent of the functionality unique to each industry included in the base system. Traditional LIMS vendors provide multiple industries with generic systems, which they or their customers have to heavily customize to meet the basic yet very different requirements of each customer's industry. This takes both time and money.
Figure 2. Thompson LIMS Result Entry with Real-Time Trending
In fact, in a recent report1 on the LIMS industry, one LIMS vendor was quoted as saying, "Another constant over the years, and it is a real problem for the LIMS industry, is that there are far too many implementation failures. Over-selling is rampant and customers do not seem to be getting better at selections, even the second or third time around."
This is rather harsh on customers. It will always be very difficult for customers to evaluate generic LIMS systems with respect to meeting their needs since these systems do not come configured to meet the needs of any single client or industry.
Customers have had to make a best guess how they can fill the gaps between what the generic system does as standard and what must be custom-coded in order to go live. Vendors have relied on the product demonstration to influence the purchasing decision. But it is difficult to separate in a demonstration what functionality comes standard with the software and what functionality has been included in, for want of a better word, the "demoware."
Figure 3. Thompon LIMS Laboratory Explorer GUI
The situation is further complicated for the customer because, after they have spent, for example, $100,000 for the base system, they then have to invest at least that amount again, plus spend 18 to 20 months, to implement and validate the generic system so that it meets their needs. This has led many senior managers overseeing a LIMS implementation to question, "What exactly is it we're paying for?"
The reality is that the generic LIMS business model is tremendously commercially beneficial to vendors. Another LIMS market survey2 published at the end of last year noted, "Because LIMS is service intensive in the post-sale cycle, many suppliers have strengthened their service departments to assist their customers in the implementation process and have actually reported double digit growth in this area."
It is obvious that many vendors realize that a commercial off-the-shelf system (COTS) that a user can easily configure to meet their needs will severely threaten the revenue-generating potential of their services department and the profitability of the company. A large percentage of these service costs are unseen at the time of purchase, requiring the client to trust that the vendor will provide the solution envisaged on time and in budget. It is often the case that any computer system undergoing extensive customization and implementation rarely met this customer requirement.
To be a viable non-generic solution, a LIMS must provide the customer with the functionality that they need to run their business at a profit. This places a tremendous burden on vendors who adopt this approach — such as InnaPhase — to ensure that their development and services teams have the industry experience to develop these solutions. The InnaPhase development department, which constitutes over a third of the company's employees, has been recruited from a variety of backgrounds: IT, scientific, pharmaceutical and medical. From the last two categories alone, InnaPhase employs 16 Ph.D.s and one M.D. to ensure that the company has the required expertise to produce world-leading products.
This does not mean that purpose-built systems are fixed. On the contrary, these solutions must provide the end-user with the flexibility and tools to configure the LIMS to meet their exact needs.For the customer, purpose-built means that — for the first time — they can actually see what it is they are buying and how the functionality provided meets the vast majority of their specific needs.
Another benefit for the customer is reduced implementation and validation time and expense. With as much as 90 percent of the functionality already in place, a purpose-built solution is configured and validated in a fraction of the time when compared to the time necessary to customize, implement and validate a generic system.
Given these challenges facing customers, InnaPhase has endeavored to reduce the risk and difficulty of a LIMS investment by taking a lead with its vertical solutions. The strategy was validated with the first sale of the Newton solution within weeks of the product release.
"Rather than spending a year or more customizing and validating a LIMS, our efforts can be directed toward using the LIMS to make our labs more efficient," said Brad Huddleston, LIMS administrator for Schwarz Pharma Mfg. Inc., the Seymour, IN-based laboratory and manufacturing facility for Schwarz Pharma. "In evaluating Newton, its benefits became clear: shorter implementation time for a quicker return on our investment."
One year after starting this trend, however, it does appear that InnaPhase was simply ahead of the game. The LIMS Survey2 continued that, "Manufacturers are beginning to move toward COTS rather than highly customized solutions, there is no one-size-fits-all LIMS solution."
Indeed the report concluded that rather than commercial viability, generic solutions are, in fact, the risky option. The report stated, "In a market that values industry expertise, the risk lies in attempting to be all things to all labs in all industries."
Architecture
The architecture of the new products developed by InnaPhase also differs from the previous client/server models that existed in the LIMS industry. InnaPhase developed a new product framework using Oracle as the RDBMS, J2EE and Web services. They also were the first leading LIMS company not to simply layer Web-based functionality on top of a legacy client/server system. The reason for the selection of this architecture are many fold, for example, Frost and Sullivan in their 2004 LIMS1 survey concluded:
1. The nature of a LIMS requires that there be significant communication between the user interface and the server. For example, business rules need to be applied to ensure that results are logical and within specifications
2. Browser-based technologies have drawbacks with regard to the speed of back and forth communication
3. Client/server architecture can be expensive to deploy and maintain
4. Customers want the performance of a client/server system with the flexibility of a Web-based application
5. Ultimately, the market may favor an architecture that uses Web services to enhance browser-based applications with a goal of delivering both functionality and performance at lower deployment costs
These conclusions from one of the leading market analyst companies of the LIMS industry are clear vindication of the the J2EE, Web services framework exploited by InnaPhase to provide Newton users with the maximum performance and return on investment with reduced cost of ownership.
It should be remembered, however, that these technologies are not mutually exclusive. InnaPhase believes that pure browser-based functionality does have an important role to play in the modern LIMS market, especially for the sharing of information across a company's enterprise. To that end, InnaPhase has developed and is providing free-of-charge to their user-base their latest reporting tool: Retriever.
Retriever is actually one of a suite of horizontal applications that InnaPhase has developed to provide standardized, technologically advanced solutions that complement its products. It is an enterprise solution that provides customers a robust Web-based reporting platform that spans across InnaPhase products.
Retriever is based on the widely used Crystal reporting solution and uses Web services to integrate with other applications. InnaPhase customers can now run Crystal reports against Watson, Newton and Galileo LIMS, as well as InnaPhase's EP Series for PK/PD data in drug development, LabManager iLIMS and the new Thompson LIMS for non-pharma customers. With its Web interface, Retriever's users are not tied to their desktops anymore to report against data stored in any of the InnaPhase product databases. With packaged reports and application-specific data views that have been developed based on customer feedback, Retriever — in keeping with the InnaPhase product strategy — can be used out-of-the-box.
Like other pioneers, InnaPhase's unique approach to LIMS is quickly being recognized by independent market analysts as a viable model for the industry to adopt in order to move forward and expand in the future.
InnaPhase is continuing its purpose-built strategy with the introduction of Thompson LIMS, its first solution to break away from the pharmaceutical marketplace. Just as they did at PITTCON the year before with Newton, InnaPhase previewed Thompson at PITTCON 2004 in Chicago. Based on the Newton framework of J2EE, Web services and Oracle, Thompson is being developed with specific configurations for such vertical market sectors as food and beverage, petrochemical and environmental. The Thompson product is scheduled for release later in 2004, and based on InnaPhase's proven track record for meeting release dates, you should all watch this space.
As a company, InnaPhase is tremendously pleased not only to have delivered on the promises they made to the market at PITTCON 2003, but that its "what you see is what you get" LIMS solutions are adding confidence to the LIMS-buying process, adding value to customers' laboratories, and providing targeted solutions for vertical markets.
References
1. Frost and Sullivan, Strategic Analysis of the World Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) Markets, March 2004.
2. ARC Advisory Group, Laboratory Information Management Systems Worldwide Outlook, December 2003.