In an effort to make it easier to incorporate its discovery informatics tools into high-throughput workflows, Tripos recently made two moves: It has partnered with pipeline vendor SciTegic, and it announced support for a Web-services architecture.
“We want to ensure that customers can use our tools however they want to within their [operations],” says Bryan Koontz, senior vice president and general manager of Discovery Informatics at Tripos. Both the partnership with SciTegic and the Web services architecture approach enable this type of use of the Tripos informatics tools within a high-throughput workflow or pipeline.
Specifically, with respect the partnership, Tripos has joined SciTegic’s independent software vendor partner program. From a practical standpoint, this means there is software compatibility between the two companies’ products. The benefit of such a partnership to customers is that a life science company is assured that the Tripos’ discovery chemistry and informatics products can be accessed from within SciTegic’s Pipeline Pilot.
The companies claim this compatibility (and level of integration) is something that will benefit customers. “Many of our customers already use Tripos’ software,” said Mathew Hahn, SciTegic’s vice president and general manager. “Through this partnership, our joint users will [be able to] employ Tripos technologies in the workflow-centric Pipeline Pilot environment to solve more-complex problems and to reach a broader audience of users through the flexible deployment of validated processing routines.” (Hahn’s comments came in a prepared statement when the partnership was announced.)
Easier IntegrationEarlier this month, Tripos announced it would embrace Web services as a way to give life science companies more flexibility in developing, deploying, and accessing discovery informatics technologies and applications.
As part of this strategy, dubbed Service-Oriented Informatics (SOI), Tripos will provide a Web-services interface to its discovery chemistry and informatics tools and applications.
Koontz notes that adding support for SOI is due in part to the way life science R&D is changing. For instance, while tools for desktop efforts remain essential, there is growing use of “more loosely coupled, server-centric architectures with software deployed as flexible Web services than can adapt to each company’s unique discovery workflows,” says Koontz.
Being able to incorporate tools and applications into discovery workflows “is critical for improving the agility and productivity of cross-functional research teams,” says Koontz. “And Web services is the mechanism to do the integration.”
The SOI support will also make it easier for companies to run applications on distributed systems such as cluster and grids.