Accelrys Takes on Productivity Gap with Scientific Lifecycle Software

[Corrected 5/1/12, 10:35 am. See below.] Amid a nationwide effort to spur a renaissance in American manufacturing, San Diego-based Accelrys (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ACCL]]) is flipping on the switch today for technology that represents a culmination of much of the strategy that CEO Max Carnecchia outlined for me last year.

At that time, Carnecchia explained how the company’s $175 million merger with Symyx was knitting together “a series of individual islands of capabilities”—creating a series of scientific software products to help manage the entire process of scientific development, from R&D to commercialization and manufacturing.

Accelrys has added a couple more islands since then, and is working to create a comprehensive archipelago of scientific software as a service. Last May, the company paid $13.1 million to acquire Contur Software, a private Swedish developer of Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) software used by scientific organizations to document their research. In January, Accelrys paid another $35 million to buy VelQuest, a Hopkinton, MA-based company that makes software used to help life sciences organizations manage their lab test procedures and keep them in compliance with FDA regulations.

[Corrects product name to The Accelrys Enterprise Platform] Today Accelrys is introducing a Web-based technology platform that combines elements of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) for scientific-driven R&D organizations. Accelrys calls it The Accelrys Enterprise Platform, saying it encompasses the full course of scientific innovation lifecycle management—from inception through R&D, commercialization, manufacturing, and even product disposal.

Michael Doyle

“We have some customers who maintain information on [product] formulation, carbon footprint, and ultimately the breakdown of the product,” says Michael Doyle, the company’s director of product marketing and principal scientist. With the platform, Doyle says the company is taking an enterprise-wide approach that enables pharmaceutical, chemical, energy, and other science-driven industries to connect far-flung pieces of their global businesses. Applications built on the Accelrys platform are web-based and run in the cloud.

As part of the company’s enterprise approach to supporting scientific-led innovation, Accelrys also is issuing what it calls “an industry-wide call to close the productivity gap” that is slowing the process of product development and increasing the time it takes to bring new products to market. “The Accelrys platform is foundational to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.