IT collaborators converge
The "-omics" revolutions have blessed the biotech industry with a plethora of data that is widely dispersed in various data warehouses. But companies have been bogged down by the amount of data and the efforts necessary to align and structure the individual containers in which the data reside. A number of efforts have been started to address this issue, and two deals announced last week approach the problem from the perspectives of visualization across data sources and standardization across data structures.
A collaboration between IBM Corp. (IBM, Armonk, N.Y.) and Spotfire Inc. (Somerville, Mass.) will couple Spotfire's DecisionSite front-end graphical visualization tool with IBM's back-end platform and middleware around the relational DB2 database and DiscoveryLink, IBM's genomics browser tool for accessing genomics databases. Aventis S.A. (AVE, Strasbourg, France) was announced as the first client...