Second Conference: Final Day

The first official day of the IQPC Pharma IQ ELN Conference was so eventful, I don’t know where to start. I know you’ve all heard that, before, but some of these conferences have so much going on that I don’t find it that easy to narrow it down. However, one thing I will talk about, here, is some news about cloudspace that I think is a milestone.

There were many good talks. There’s been a lot of networking. A couple people who said they were usually a bit shy have gotten the nerve up to talk to talk to just about everyone who is doing something similar to what they are doing or want to do. The networking activity is strong. I’ve gotten the impression that most of the customers in attendance feel it’s worth the money to attend. Even the software vendors say they get a lot of information from attending. The software vendors are required to pay significant fees to attend, though, so there is no guarantee that they would all keep attending if the conference situation continues as it is, which is that there are many conferences, it’s hard to get unique speakers for them, and people want to see uniqueness and value when they shop for conferences to attend or sponsor.

Talking about sponsorship and such, TheIntegratedLab.com (http://theintegratedlab.com/) is a media partner with the IQPC Pharma IQ ELN Conference. So, John Trigg and I have been shamelessly plugging the site. Well, I guess I’ve been the shameless one – John does it with tact and good manners.   ;-)

As with last week’s conference, many themes come up, over-and-over. There was plenty of talk about the cloud. Before I talk more on that, I should mention that the first conference night is usually a cocktail reception and networking mixer. Afterwards, if you’re lucky, one vendor or another might invite you along to a rather nice meal. Last SmartLabs, ChemAxon invited me out. The previous SmartLabs, it was Symyx. Last night, CambridgeSoft. But the reason I bring this up, here, is that the CambridgeSoft meal was not just extremely delicious and upscale and in a place oozing with atmosphere, but they also made some product announcements at the beginning.

Going back a bit, some of you already know that Microsoft had come out and said they were now moving in the cloud arena. Now, it turns out that they are specifically moving into providing cloud space for health records. And I know this because CambridgeSoft announced their partnership with Microsoft on this effort, how SharePoint fits into it all, and other bits of similar news.

The reason I’m truly excited is this: we’ve talked (and talked and talked) about the cloud but many were waiting to see how others would approach it, first. In this and last week’s conferences, it seems more and more Life Sciences companies are trying it out. But I’d long said that what could make a big difference in the adoption of the cloud by the Life Sciences was to have a cloud that specifically addressed their issues with security, privacy, up-time, latency, etc... With a health records cloud, I would think that Microsoft has had to do just that. So, I wonder if we won’t see more cloudspace focused specifically on areas such as this that absolutely have to have all these issues addressed.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/