PerkinElmer extends TIBCO Spotfire deal

BOSTON—PerkinElmer Inc. (PKI) announced at its recent PerkinElmer Informatics 2013 user group meeting in Waltham, Mass., near its Boston home, that the company has extended its strategic partnership agreement with TIBCO Software Inc. to offer the TIBCO Spotfire data visualization software platform to clinical and translational and personalized medicine markets. In addition, PKI Informatics’ newest electronic laboratory notebook version, E-Notebook 2014, was unveiled at the meeting.

The announcements were delivered to a global informatics community during the user group meeting’s opening talk, given by Clive Higgins, PerkinElmer’s vice president of informatics marketing, to an audience of more than 200 conference attendees representing 130 organizations from 16 countries. Higgins’ presentation, titled “A Year of Transformation,” discussed the sense of momentum felt across the informatics industry, and especially amongst the PKI Informatics team.

A key backdrop for the presentation was the fact that the world bioinformatics market will likely exceed $7.5 billion by 2017, up from less than $2.5 billion in 2011, Higgins noted. The important thing, he urged, is that “we remember to look at informatics in the context of improving human health.”

Informatics plays many roles in the process of progressing global health and medicine, such as accelerating and protecting the discovery process, fostering collaboration and increasing efficiencies, he noted, adding: “Our portfolio of informatics solutions spans from personal scientific applications through to data creation, acquisition, storage, management and analytics.”

“How scientists capture and visualize their data through the TIBCO Spotfire platform is fundamental to how scientists conduct their work. Spotfire is a critical data analysis tool for the R&D community and complements PerkinElmer’s informatics offering by adding search and data visualization, which are among the most pressing business requirements of life-science, diagnostics and environmental laboratories worldwide,” Higgins said. “Through this strategic relationship, we are very excited to offer scientists a complete package of data generation, data management as well as data analysis and visualization to better harness information for more informed insights and decisions. The interoperability of PerkinElmer’s E-Notebook with the TIBCO Spotfire platform puts all information in one place for our customers.”

As for E-Notebook 2014, PerkinElmer reports that it has a range of improvements that include full integration with inventory and registration, canned protocols for numerous biological applications, drastically increased processing speed (especially in search functions) and greatly reduced the time and cost of upgrading.

The expanded offering of the TIBCO Spotfire software platform comes one year after PerkinElmer first signed an exclusive deal with TIBCO Software to represent Spotfire in the research market. Over the last year, the informatics team has invested in developing add-on applications like Lead Discovery and Datalytix, and in the creation of modules that handle ‘omics and high-content screening.

The extended partnership reportedly allows PerkinElmer to offer TIBCO Spotfire not only to the research market, but also to clinical and translational/personalized medicine markets. Additional add-ons will be developed for TIBCO Spotfire that will merge clinical data with ‘omics research data coming directly from clinical patients.

Working with a partner, PKI Informatics has already created an application tracking physical clinical samples, routing them for research and then merging the clinical data with the subsequently gathered ‘omics research data, which allows for the segmentation of clinical populations based on genotypic and phenotypic research data.

As for TIBCO’s perspective, Matt Quinn, the company’s chief technology officer, says that “Joining forces strengthens our vertical industry focus on pharmaceuticals and biotech—as well as many others—while giving TIBCO the means and capacity to focus on, and successfully invest in, expansion into other verticals and horizontals.”