What does "Blue Sky your Analytical Desktop Software" mean?
Definition
Blue-Sky adj. involving new and interesting ideas which are not yet possible or practical.
Our Interpretation
"Blue-Sky your analytical desktop software" is the ability to allow you the freedom to tell us what you want and need in your ideal analytical software platform and to work with us to achieve that goal. This also consistent with our philosophy of wanting to provide you with 100% of what you want.
A case story from our history that explains a little of why we promote such an approach
Prior to the formation of Virscidian, we were part of a CRO laboratory. Our experiences in running such a company were that our customers all wanted something different in terms of the samples they wanting running and the specifics of the assay, the content and layout of the report, and the final information package that was delivered.
We found that the sample information came to us in many different formats, ensuring that lots of transcription was necessary to get the input to the whole process in the right format. Of course there are many ways to solve the challenge, one of which is to have a template that the customers must provide their information in, which is all well and good, but requires the customer to do the upfront work.
CRO businesses are very capital intensive in that you have to keep the instruments busy all the time, requiring that all your processes are optimized to save time. Thus having lots of manual steps just to get things in and out in the right format while
necessary was also a real problem to the business.
In most cases we found that many software packages available in the industry had excellent functionality, each able to do something that bit different from the others, however for our different processing needs you had to have a different package, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Overall, having to use different packages meant we sacrified the consistency and flexibility. This meant we were forced to have lots of intermediate steps, leading to increased time and complexity inour processes. We also struggled with having to know lots of different software packages from lots of different companies so that we could achieve our goals. This adds a fair amount of additional burden and time which translates at the end of the day into a direct cost to the business.
So a necessary and practical part of our philosophy was to allow flexibility throughout the entire end-to-end workflow or process without putting productivity roadblocks in the way of our work.
How does this shape what Virscidian can do?
In order to deliver on the flexibility needs of the CRO business, and Joseph being a co-owner and developer of many varied software solutions, he set out to build what is known as an Analytical Development Framework (Analytical Studio Framework). This framework can be considered as a container to which specific functionality (plugins) can be attached to deliver specific functionality. For example: A plugins that allows us to create summary reports in excel where all the alias field names are completely customizable. This then allows Excel report files to be created where the field names are exactly in the format and name convention required by the customer. Other example plugins are: baselining, method editor container into which we can build specific processing methodologies, LC/MS componentization, visualization, SQL database queries and so on... Indeed pretty much most aspects of the actual functionality of any product we produce is about gluing together the right plugins, and extending where we need too.
Of course, as a CRO it is not possible to create a new desktop software for each customer assay, and indeed that is the case, however the key is that we engineered in flexibility from the ground-up. When it came to the assays, we built the appropriate flexibility to ensure we could do our work and deliver the final information package to our customers needs rather than our constraints.
Talk to us if you are interested to know how we can help you potentially solve your practical day-to-day analytical needs. Contact Us.
How can we help?
We are able to offer you our consultation services which firstly are there to understand and analyze the feasibility of your needs and whether we are able to achieve your goals.
Irrespective of the actual solution to your project needs, we are flexible in our approach and will advise you of the most appropriate solution, the costs, and timescales. In most cases we are able to offer a fixed project price, so that you are able to know ahead of time what the actual projects costs will be.
We deliver our projects using a rapid prototyping approach, which means we deliver the project as many small working pieces where you get to use, apply and give feedback on what has been created and have this fine tuned to deliver your actual needs. We use this approach because, in our experience, creating a document or series of documents to support every possible variant of what you want is time consuming, and ultimately does not really capture in an easily transferable form your exact needs. If you want an indication of what we mean by this, then take a relatively simple object and then try and write down a description of what you want and then have someone else interpret this for you... You'll often find yourself amazed at the variation that you will get in the final result... Scientific Analytical Software is often complex and hence why we prefer the rapid prototype approach, with supporting documented specifications to support the key aspects of what you want.
A key part of achieving blue sky implementations, is breaking the entire project into small pieces with feasibility components built in where some aspect of what you want is high risk and thus requires more research than formal implementation. If we focus on the high risk items in the early parts of the project then we can advise quickly on the likely feasibility of the final result.
For additional background on some of our services, our technologies please feel free to browse or contact us.
Analytical Studio Professional - Compound QC
An example of a commercialized workflow product. Read More...
Analytical Studio Express
Virscidian's automated scalable file management, processing, reporting and publishing module. Read More...
Analytical Studio Framework
Virscidian's rapid development scientific analytical software development platform. Read More...
Scalability of Virscidian's Software Environment
From a single copy of desktop software to team based working and centralized data management. Read More...
Integration Services
A true end-to-end workflow is not a workflow unless it is fully integrated into how you work. Read More...