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| Illumina CEO Jay Flatley |
Illumina ($ILMN) has detailed how it intends to start generating income from its cloud app platform BaseSpace. The plan includes the creation of two paid-for packages that bundle together assorted features, some of which are targeted specifically at larger organizations.
From next year, users will choose one of three subscription packages, the most basic of which is free but limited. The top-tier gives BaseSpace users the option to integrate laboratory information management systems (LIMS) from Illumina's recent acquisition GenoLogics, plus a domain for up to 25 users and the ability to keep tabs on multiple instruments and sequencing runs. Subscribers to the basic package will have access to the BaseMount command line interface and the ability share data, but will need to open their wallets to make full use of BaseSpace and its app ecosystem.
Illumina is making 1TB of storage available to everyone for free, but above this users must buy extra space at the retail price charged by Amazon Web Services (AWS). As it stands, an additional terabyte will set users back $360 a year. Illumina is also tying the cost of computation to AWS rates. The free computation provided by Illumina to date will end in March, although it is softening the blow by giving every new and existing user $200 in credit. Illumina is yet to reveal its pricing structure for the two paid-for subscription tiers.
News of the implementation of fees comes three years after Illumina first set prices for BaseSpace. In the intervening years, Illumina has worked to make BaseSpace more compelling for users. "We've been impressed with the flexibility of BaseSpace to handle data from all of the Illumina platforms, including the HiSeq X system," Shawn Levy, a director the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, said in a statement. "The ability to upload, store and analyze large-scale genomic information and share it to a cloud in real time has been a tremendous benefit to our operation."
- read the release
- and blog post