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Key takeaways:
- Dassault Systèmes expands the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform with its latest brand, BIOVIA, which is focused on supporting the development of biological and chemical materials at the molecular level
- BIOVIA consists of Accelrys, the recently acquired scientific innovation lifecycle management (SILM) solution provider, and results from an internal research project, BioIntelligence
- BIOVIA’s solutions offer capabilities that extend the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform and broaden the support of the life science and material development markets
The Accelrys user conference, Accelerate 2014, was held May 21-23 at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington, D.C. A crowd of over 300 customers, partners, and Dassault Systèmes staff attended to discuss the latest products and services from Accelrys as well as industrial and academic applications presented by customers. Industries represented included chemical, pharmaceutical, and food and beverage from around the globe. Many academic institutions were also in attendance. Fifty-five presentations from companies like Amgen, Colgate, DuPont, and Merck, and academic institutions like MIT and Purdue were delivered and showed how the Accelrys solutions are being used to solve real problems and develop products. In the two days prior to the conference general sessions, Accelrys offered product training sessions.
Mr. Max Carnecchia, CEO of Accelrys, reviewed some of the achievements from the past year including:
- ScienceCloud—A software-as-a-service (SaaS) information management and collaboration workspace for drug discovery
- Qumas—A recent compliance and quality management solution acquisition
- ChemSW—An acquired solution to support environmental and health & safety compliance
In addition to the new product and acquisitions, Accelrys released over 200 updates to its broad range of products in 2013. A key theme of the conference was “Better science, better products.” The Accelrys solutions support scientific or formulated product development from the conceptual modeling stage through development, testing, compliance, and production.
Mr. Bernard Charlès, CEO of Dassault Systèmes, then joined Mr. Carnecchia on stage. Mr. Charlès described how he engaged with Mr. Carnecchia over two years ago, and how it ultimately led to the acquisition. He then announced the new name for Accelrys, BIOVIA, which will also include a 5-year R&D program at Dassault known as BioIntelligence. According to Mr. Charlès, BIOVIA starts out as number one in the market with a mission to “Provide a scientific collaborative environment for advanced biological, chemical, and materials experiences. The sophisticated enterprise system of modeling, simulation, laboratory, and quality management enables innovation for science-based industries”.
Dassault Systèmes has made a large investment to support the biological, chemical, and materials industries by extending its 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. A common platform can enable better collaboration across disciplines and support the integration of formulated product elements with the rest of the product definition, an area where CIMdata has seen a lot of interest over the past few years. This integration should help reduce product development costs and timing and improve regulatory compliance.
Accelrys made many acquisitions over the past few years, and while many releases, updates and patches were delivered in 2013, they recognize this is not sustainable. A major effort is underway to migrate from their current product portfolio to a platform strategy with integrated applications. Accelrys understood that this cannot happen overnight and has a roadmap known as the Product Plan of Record (PPOR) that describes the current releases, the next release, and the release to follow that. It shows the compatibility between solutions. This will help customers better plan which releases to deploy to meet their business requirements while avoiding interoperability surprises.
Ultimately, BIOVIA will have a product convergence where there will be a unified user experience, integrated modular applications, based on a scalable, secure, manageable, extensible foundation within the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. Updates to the PPOR will help customers’ upgrade strategy and the convergence should simplify the user experience and make business processes more effective. CIMdata is confident that Accelrys customers will end up with a capable, stable, and efficient Scientific Innovation Lifecycle (SILC) platform.
The Lab of the Future initiative was presented as a key strategy to improve scientific innovation by enabling virtual and physical lab testing in a common environment. Using simulation to build virtual product models and then executing virtual tests can screen more products quicker at a lower cost. The products that pass the virtual tests and meet target requirements move on to physical testing for formal validation. In addition to this core capability, social interactions will be integrated to support better communication. BIOVIA demonstrated their vision of the lab of the future by staging a skit complete with props and backdrops meant to represent the lab of the future, LabOne. It showed how team members interacted to submit a lab request, process it, and make decisions about how the business should move ahead. It went well beyond the typical Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to give lab users a fun and functional experience, independent of the device being used. Phones, tablets, laptop, desktop, and interfaces to test equipment were all demonstrated within a secure workflow supported by comprehensive data management.
David B. Agus, M.D., a leading cancer physician, pioneering biomedical researcher, and author of The End of Illness, gave an interesting talk about science and health. He reviewed many statistics and studies and talked about how to be healthier. One statistic that hit home in this audience of office workers was that five hours of sitting has a negative effect on the human body equivalent to smoking one pack of cigarettes per day. He personally uses a standing desk with a treadmill at least two hours a day while working on a computer. According to Dr. Agus, many of today’s common health recommendations, such as taking vitamins, are not supported by data. Or, where there is data, the picture is incomplete because not all appropriate metrics are tracked. He is excited by the applications of technology to the healthcare system, and agreed with the BIOVIA premise that better modeling and better testing will lead to better products that improve the quality of life.
BIOVIA and their customers delivered a wide range of presentations across four parallel tracks:
- Process Management and Compliance
- Life Science Research
- Chemicals, CPG, Food & Beverage, Materials
- Enterprise Platform
Many of the presentations showed how the BIOVIA solutions were impacting real issues in healthcare like developing treatments for cancer, and environmental issues. The customers were excited about their Accelrys solutions and looking forward to BIOVIA’s future developments. The BIOVIA team presentations included case studies and strategies for getting more value from applications.
The Product Showcase & Partner Gallery enabled BIOVIA and its partners to give live demonstrations on their solutions. Attendees got to see a wide range of capabilities and discussions with experts offered a learning experience that could help them expand capabilities within their organizations.
CIMdata believes that Dassault Systèmes’ acquisition of Accelrys is a major expansion of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. Accelrys users are very satisfied with their solutions and excited about the potential that was presented by the BIOVIA team. A wealth of information and knowledge was exchanged in the keynotes, tracks, and during the social time. CIMdata was impressed by the confidence of BIOVIA and believes that Dassault Systèmes has the vision and resources to enable BIOVIA to have a large impact on science-based organizations. We are looking forward to seeing the progress made at next year’s conference.
