Much of Europe's major investment in IT is being made by pharmaceutical and bioscience companies. While a new survey shows that this investment will continue to grow, some companies are turning to grid computing in a strategy that saves money and could prove good business for CROs too.
Pharmaceutical and bioscience companies are leading the way in Europe when it comes to investment in IT. And according to a new survey by Forrester Research, this investment is likely to grow enormously in the next three years.
Speaking at the company's Leadership in Forum in Amsterdam on 9 April, Forrester European Research Centre Director Matthew M Nordan outlined the survey's findings: "Significantly, the research shows that while the downturn has negatively impacted many European firms' tech investment today, Europe's executives are committed to technology and resolve to increase spending within the next two years.“
IT budgets
In contrast with the late 1990s when their budgets rose every year, the 212 executives that Forrester surveyed indicated that most companies either shrank or held steady their IT budgets in the first three months of this year, and they do not anticipate a change in the foreseeable future. When we asked what actions their companies had taken in the past six months with regard to technology spending, an overwhelming 72 per cent said they had encountered new, specific pressure to reduce IT costs. One in four respondents had delayed projects already in the works, and one in five are now cancelling projects.
"However, in contrast to the pressure to cut technology costs, European firms still depend on technology to drive growth,“ Nordan added. "Of those that had decreased their budgets, the top two reasons were the overall economic downturn and weak individual company performance - not that technology was getting less important. Indeed, companies are still relying on technology for growth, as evidenced by their future spending plans. Three-fourths of respondents expect their budgets to rise in fact, they expect them to be a whopping 53 per cent bigger in 2005. Nearly half expect to increase headcount, by an average of 43 per cent. Companies are going to keep ploughing money and bodies into technology because they have to,“ he concluded.
Even without this extra investment, however, the question still arises as to whether or not companies are making the best use of their existing hardware's processing power. In most cases the answer is probably not. So would it not make sense to borrow the extra power from hardware that is not being used rather than investing in expensive new systems?
This idea of making use of unused or underused capacity to bolster areas where demand is high is known as grid computing. In effect a company directs all of its computing power where it is needed, creating a virtual supercomputer in the process.
And by harnessing the power of the internet, a CRO in Belgium, for example, might buy computer time from a pharmaceutical company in the US or China to help with its complex data analyses.
While the idea of grid computing only left IT research laboratories in the last few years, the world's major server manufacturers are showing a lively interest in the subject. Acting together, they could create a pool of computing capacity around the world, with companies buying the time they need for their particular task and at the same time doing away with the need for users to buy all the hardware needed to do the task themselves.
There are obvious problems, however. Would privacy and security concerns prevent restrict the number of pharmaceutical companies that the Belgian CRO would consider using? To tackle such issues an R&D project called the Globus Project was set up in 1996. Today major companies such as Microsoft and IBM are corporate partners and a Globus Toolkit that includes software for security, communication, data management and portability has been developed.The day that CROs and pharmaceutical companies are able to fully leverage the power of PC grid computing came closer in February. That was when Entropia, a leading provider of PC grid distributed computing solutions, announced that Isis Pharmceuticals had agreed to deploy its DCGrid enterprise distributed computing products. Isis also joined Entropia's advisory programme, which focuses on PC-based distributed computing to accelerate life sciences research.
Entropia's DCGrid product line delivers an open, high-performance platform for enabling and deploying compute-intensive applications within an enterprise. It creates a cost-effective means to utilise the latent power locked up in the networked PCs within the enterprise. DCGrid enables customers to integrate and deploy their own and third-party applications. DCGrid increases the performance of compute-intensive applications by allowing the customer to easily distribute and manage them across a grid of PCs. Harnessing the customer's own PCs in this manner is a powerful complement to other high performance computing options such as Linux clusters.
"We expect our Entropia-enabled network to offer performance beyond that of our existing cluster,“ said John McNeil, vice president of informatics. "DCGrid's application integration features should make it easy to become self sufficient deploying our custom research software on our own grid of PCs,“ he added.
Entropia's Life Sciences Advisory Board is a collaborative programme in which the company works closely with key customers to increase the computational productivity of their most important applications and extend the potential of DCGrid. Additionally, this teamed approach will explore new research methodologies that are made possible by the availability of the expanded high performance computing capacities delivered by DCGrid.
"We are pleased that Isis is not only deploying our distributed computing platform,“ said John Wark, ceo of Entropia, "but also working with us and other leading life sciences organisations to both understand how distributed computing can accelerate the delivery of results from existing applications as well as explore new possibilities in research models and methods that are made possible by the availability of low-cost, high performance PC grid computing.“
Developing therapeutic drugs
Isis Pharmaceuticals intends to use the DCGrid to further exploit its expertise in RNA to discover and develop novel human therapeutic drugs. The company has already commercialised its first product, Vitravene to treat CMV-induced retinitis in AIDS patients and has 12 products in its development pipeline, with two in late-stage development and six in Phase II human clinical trials.
Isis now joins Bristol Myers Squibb and Novartis, who are also piloting DCGrid. u
