Content area
Full Text
Is Cloud adoption right on track or lagging in the life sciences?
At the recent Molecular Medicine TriConference (MMTC) in San Francisco*, an industry executive took me aside to ask: "Is Cloud computing ever going to take off?" The question frames an expectation that Cloud computing should be happening faster, but Cloud adoption depends on your definition of Cloud computing. If you consider the Cloud as "information-as-a-service," then life sciences and biological research are indeed the early adopters. Web portals such as NCBI Entrez, the UCSC Genome Browser, and EBI Ensemble carry a tremendous computational load for academic and industrial research. Despite large investments in private bio-portals, researchers often prefer public portals, because the information is more up to date and has better user interfaces.
In contrast, many private portals have not kept pace. In response, pharma IT executives have launched the Pistoia Alliance, a pre-competitive initiative designed to sponsor innovation by defining interoperability standards for commercial tools (see, "The Italian (Informatics) Job," Bio'IT World, Jan 2010). Pharma executives are giving each other permission to take the lead and outsource services they previously delivered in-house.
Commercial services such as CAS Registry, STN, Delphion, Micropatent, Ingenuity, GeneGo, and GenomeQuest provide...