The completion of the acquisition of Life Technologies' SQL*LIMS business by LabVantage on 7 August unites two prominent Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) businesses in Sapphire and SQL*LIMS.
Speaking to Scientific Computing World, Jim Aurelio, president and CEO of LabVantage commented that LabVantage will continue to support the SQL*LIMS product in accordance with the pre-existing support level matrix for SQL*LIMS: 'We know that our customers have invested heavily in the SQL*LIMS product; we know that the solution is working well in their laboratories and we want to be sure that there’s no disruption to them at all. We will continue to support the product and enable them to upgrade to SQL*LIMS version 6, which will be powered by Sapphire.'
Version 6 will have the functionality associated with SQL*LIMS, but it will ultimately be run on the Sapphire platform – a zero-footprint (i.e., no downloads, applets, or other content on the end user client) and rich Internet application. Therefore, version 6 will have additional functionality available from Sapphire, such as the Corrective Action and Preventive Action (CAPA) module, a strong Stability module, and the Advanced Storage and Logistics (ASL) module, among other functionality.
'Sapphire also has a lot of functionality to serve the R&D needs of the enterprise,' commented Aurelio, 'so our [LabVantage's] long-term strategy is to serve the customer from late stage [product] discovery all the way through quality management on one product platform and for users to be able to share data across that continuum.'
The coming together of the two organisations aggregates more than 250 LIMS professionals in LabVantage that will continue to work to implement and support Sapphire and SQL*LIMS worldwide. Of note, Pat Pijanowski, former general manager of the SQL*LIMS business, has joined LabVantage as its chief operating officer.
'LabVantage didn’t have a very strong presence in Europe and by acquiring the SQL*LIMS business it gave us [LabVantage] the opportunity to extend our reach into Europe and also gave us a large number of domain experts that will enable us to better service our global customers,' said Aurelio.
'SQL*LIMS is also very functionally rich for the quality management market, especially pharmaceutical manufacturing,' he continued. As a result, some notable features in the SQL*LIMS product will be added into future releases of Sapphire.
Aurelio concluded that by coupling the additional expertise the merger provides with Sapphire's zero-footprint architecture, functionality, and configurability, LabVantage has a strong combination of both professional and product.
SQL*LIMS customers will have the chance to discuss the acquisition and to express their needs, both in the short and long term, at the next SQL*LIMS Inform user meeting, an online symposium scheduled for 9 September.
