case study: thermo fisher

© 2011 OpSource, Inc. All rights reserved.

“We asked them a lot of questions to gauge what their level of expertise was, and the responses we received strongly indicated that OpSource had the requisite experience we needed from a cloud hosting provider. We eventually went with them because our assessment showed they had a superior mix of solid managed service and cost control.”

Thermo Fisher Scientific Leads the Way with LIMS Thermo Fisher Scientific is the world leader in serving science, providing analytical instruments, equipment, reagents and consumables, software and services for research, analysis, discovery, and diagnostics. With annual sales of nearly $11 billion, Thermo Fisher Scientific has approximately 37,000 employees and serves more than 350,000 clients in pharmaceutical and biotech companies, hospitals and clinical diagnostic labs, universities, research institutions and government agencies, as well as environmental, industrial quality and process control settings.

Thermo Fisher’s Informatics division specializes in Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), software applications used in laboratories for the management of samples, lab users, instruments, standards, and other laboratory functions such as workflow automation and report generation. Laboratories use LIMS to automate the management of samples, integrate with laboratory instrumentation, and print barcodes that can be scanned at the end of the analysis with results loaded into LIMS. The system can check the completed results, automatically validating those that comply with specifications and reporting out-of-spec results.

Case Study Highlights

•Thermo Scientific LIMS-on-Demand is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enterprise-class Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that allows organizations of all sizes to leverage the benefits of its industry-leading LIMS solution without the time and cost typically associated with on-premise software installation.

•Challenge: Lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of LIMS, while minimizing management responsibilities associated with a hosted solution.

•Solution: Offer the industry’s most popular laboratory information management system on a SaaS basis.

•OpSource was selected as the cloud hosting provider based on pricing, management capability, and depth of technical expertise.

Thermo Fisher Moves Labs to the Cloud

Case Study

Seamus Mac Conaonaigh Director of Technology, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Informatics


With more than 1,500 systems sold to date, and a 35 percent share of the market in the life science and biotech sectors, Thermo Fisher’s Informatics solutions help scientists, engineers, researchers, and business leaders make informed decisions more effectively and efficiently, ensure the quality and consistency of their data, and eliminate costly time, labor, and errors that are often introduced in the manual transfer of data.

Challenge: Lowering TCO of LIMSA LIMS can operate as a standalone system or can be integrated with other systems, such as Enterprise Resource Programs (ERPs). In either environment, the LIMS system requires significant resources to deploy and manage. This may not be an issue for larger organizations with ample IT resources; however, Thermo Fisher recognized that other firms are less able to absorb those costs. Among them, contract research organizations (CROs) and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) that perform testing under contract for larger firms, such as pharma, environmental and other industries. CROs typically operate with a small core staff to do the testing, which may last several months or less. They often can’t afford to have a datacenter and full-time IT staff.

Another client segment often struggling with the complexities of LIMS management are academic institutions, which may need a LIMS only occasionally. University

labs don’t have their own IT staff. They must depend on central IT, which isn’t always responsive.

The Informatics division at Thermo Fisher decided that offering LIMS using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosted model could benefit CROs and academic institutions, as well as any organization that needed a LIMS but didn’t want the hassle and expense of deploying and managing an on-premise software installation themselves.

SolutionThe Informatics division initially considered managing the LIMS SaaS infrastructure within Thermo Fisher’s existing IT environment. After careful consideration, however, it just didn’t make good business sense. “That’s not the business we want to be in,” says Seamus Mac Conaonaigh, Director of Technology for the Informatics group at Thermo Fisher. An evaluation team decided instead to rely on a managed hosting provider to both host and manage it.

Requirements for the provider were straightforward. Cost was of the utmost importance. Also critical was the expertise and experience of the provider’s team to effectively and reliably manage the solution. And there was one other requirement: the solution had to address client concern for data security and FDA compliance with 21 CFR Part 11, regarding electronic records and signatures. The solution had to be a closed

THERMO FISHER MOVES LABS TO THE CLOUD

“For the type of architecture that we needed for this client base, we believed OpSource was a perfect fit.”

Seamus Mac Conaonaigh Director of Technology, Thermo Fisher, Informatics


Impact: Cost-effective SolutionInterest in Thermo Scientific LIMS-on-Demand has been very positive since it was introduced in early 2010. More and more organizations are seeing the advantage of a cloud-based LIMS solution. The SaaS model significantly reduces capital investment requirements and also allows organizations to more easily and cost-effectively adapt technology as their needs change. Organizations like CROs and academic institutions can quickly scale up for a period of time and then scale down when they complete a project.

While CROs and universities are the early adopters, Mac Conaonaigh expects larger organizations to begin to implement LIMS-on-Demand once they become comfortable with hosting their data in the cloud.

As the Director of Technology for Informatics, Mac Conaonaigh’s responsibility is to work on his division’s technology strategy as a business and manage the relationships with technology partners, including Oracle and Microsoft. OpSource enables him to proactively focus on strategy and not the day-to-day issues of managing the cloud. “That’s ultimately why we went with OpSource,” says Mac Conaonaigh.

system. At no point could there be client data sharing the same machine with another client’s data.

Thermo Fisher sent questionnaires to a variety of cloud providers, from small to large, including IBM, and also interviewed staff members. OpSource was a late addition to the evaluation process. “We asked them a lot of questions, and some we already knew the answers to,” says Mac Conaonaigh. “We wanted to gauge what their level of expertise was, and the responses we received strongly indicated that OpSource had the requisite experience we needed from a cloud hosting provider. We eventually went with them because our assessment showed they had a superior mix of solid managed service and cost control.”

OpSource also met the requirements for non-multi-tenancy. “For the type of architecture that we needed, for this client base we believed OpSource was a perfect fit,” says Mac Conaonaigh.”

Since it began managing Thermo Scientific SaaS LIMS infrastructure, OpSource has demonstrated its capabilities and commitment to support many times.



About Thermo Fisher Scientific

Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO) is the world leader in serving science. The company enables its clients to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer by providing analytical instruments, equipment, reagents and consumables, software and services for research, analysis, discovery and diagnostics. For more information about Thermo Fisher Informatics capabilities, please visit www.thermoscientific.com/informatics or www.limsondemand.com.

About OpSource

Founded in 2002, OpSource provides cloud and managed hosting solutions that enable businesses to accelerate growth and scale operations while controlling costs and reducing IT infrastructure support risks. Headquartered in Santa Clara, with operations in California, Virginia, the UK, Ireland, and India, more than 600 enterprises, service providers and Software-as-a-Service ISVs rely on OpSource’s expertise, experience and cloud automation technology to operate high-availability, business-critical hosting environments. OpSource is a Dimension Data company. www.opsource.net.

Corporate Headquarters

5201 Great America Parkway, Suite 120, Santa Clara, CA 95054, 1-800-664-9973 (USA) +353 1 661 9979 (EMEA) [email protected], www.opsource.net
