As genome sequencers produce increasing volumes of data for labs to manage, companies like PerkinElmer are seizing a market opportunity to provide services and technology for researchers to store and analyze data in the cloud.
Last month PerkinElmer ($PKI) jumped into a cozy position to take advantage of this trend with its buyout of Geospiza, which sells cloud-based analysis software for microarray and genomic sequencing data. And major providers of sequencing platforms such as Illumina ($ILMN) and Life Technologies ($LIFE) have worked with software outfits like Geospiza to ensure that its customers can tap the cloud to manage the data those platforms are now yielding at unprecedented rates. Investor's Business Daily covered the trend in a recent report.
Fortunately for PerkinElmer and others in the business, drug developers appear to be getting more comfortable with storing and analyzing data in the cloud. Working with high-performance computing firm Cycle Computing, for example, the biotech giant Genentech has tapped massive processing capacity on Amazon's EC2 cloud for advanced protein analyses. And as pharmas seek better ways to keep spending in check, cloud computing might offer an alternative to investing in more internal computing capacity to handle the growing amounts of molecular data the companies are accumulating through R&D efforts.
"There's a data wave occurring," Paul Knight, an analyst at investment firm CLSA, told Investor's Business Daily. "The cloud is essential."
- see the report in Investor's Business Daily