PUNE, India—Life science and healthcare IT consulting company Optra Systems announced in December it has joined the Microsoft Bio-IT Alliance, an association of life science organizations and informatics companies whose focus is to enhance collaboration and accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development. Optra develops complete workflow management tools, including image acquisition, storage, processing, analyzing and reporting. Other alliance members include Accelrys Software Inc., Affymetrix Inc., Agilent Technologies Inc., Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Applied Biosystems, The BioTeam Inc., Digipede Technologies LLC, Discovery Biosciences Corp., Geospiza Inc., Hewlett-Packard Development Co. L.P., Illumina Inc., InterKnowlogy, Linguamatics Ltd., Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., The Scripps Research Institute and VizX Labs LLC. DDN