NEW YORK, Nov 27 – Spotfire and Thermo LabSystems have agreed to intergrate Spotfire.net with Thermo’s Nautilus Lab Information Management System, the companies said Monday. Users would need to buy both the Spotfire and Nautilus products and would have to pay Nautilus to install a link on-site. Thermo said the price of the installation is “trivial.” Once installed, customers can “highlight a group of results within Nautilus, click a button, and that data is automatically sent into Spotfire. If Spotfire is not running, it will automatically launch Spotfire for the client,” said Joe Peden, business development director for Thermo. Within Spotfire.net, users can interactively explore, analyze, and screen down to specific subsets of the array. The same subsets will be automatically highlighted for further investigation and experimentation within Nautilus. “It’s what I would call data mining with a purpose,” said Peden. “There is no point in putting data into Spotfire and doing all the funky things you could with Spotfire unless it is highlighted somewhere within the LIMS database. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.” Peden said that the company has not yet installed the link for any of its more than 800 customers. Nautilus users include SmithKline Beecham, Sequenom, Dow, Aventis, Bayer, and Curagen. Alexis Wallace, director of business development at Spotfire, said that the current deal is likely just the beginning. “For the moment it’s a very arms-length transaction,” he said. “But I believe there will be more features to it.” For example, Wallace said he expects Thermo to link its other products to Spotfire as well. Another possible expansion of the arrangement that Spotfire would like to see is a two-way exchange of data between the companies’ offerings. For now, the integration is simply a launch button from Nautilus to Spotfire.net. “From our perspective, what would be interesting would be to get the capability to go from ours to theirs and back,” said Wallace. “And that I think is phase two—we are not there yet.” Spotfire CEO Christopher Ahlberg said the deal is an example of a new direction the company is moving toward—to integrate its software into content providers’ platforms. As part of the new model Spotfire is also looking to partner with content providers and offer its software on a subscription basis. For example, the company is working with Incyte to adapt its software to Incyte’s Genomics Knowledge Platform. Thermo LabSystems, based in Cheshire, UK, is the laboratory software business unit of the publicly traded Thermo Electron Corp.
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