This week, Partek said it has opened new offices in Europe and Asia and has added five new employees to its business development and support staff to keep pace with a growing customer base in these regions.
The St. Louis, Missouri-based firm opened an office in the Biopolis of Singapore — a biomedical research and development center in Singapore — to serve customers in Asia and Australia and an office in Spain to cater to its European clients.
With the new hires, employee headcount now stands at 35 in North America and 10 in Europe and Asia.
Tom Downey, Partek's president, told BioInform, that the firm plans to hire additional staff to fill positions in several areas, including sales and marketing and software development.
Meanwhile, the firm is preparing to launch Partek Flow, cloud-based software that will be primarily for next-generation sequence data management and analysis but could also be used for microarray data, Downey said.
In addition to NGS and microarray data analysis, the new offering will allow users to share data with collaborators as well as control who has access to the data.
Furthermore, while the tool runs on Amazon's cloud, Downey said that software can also work on a single computer or on a compute cluster.
Partek plans to release the new product later this month.
Growing at a Fast Clip
Currently, Partek's customer base is growing at a faster clip in Europe and Asia than in the US market, Downey said.
"I think because we are a US company, we grew here quicker [at first] than we grew in the rest of the world, so this [new growth] is balancing things out," he explained. He estimated that Partek's North American market is growing at about 25 percent compared to about 50 percent growth in the European and Asian markets.
Furthermore, demand for the firm's software does not seem to be abating. Downey said in a statement that Partek has a renewal rate of greater than 95 percent among licensees for its Partek Genomics Suite, "and significant growth in new markets where NGS adoption is increasing."
While he did not mention specific groups, Downey told BioInform that Partek's new clients are largely sequencing centers at major universities.
Partek's Genomics Suite can analyze both NGS and microarray data and includes applications for gene expression and digital gene expression, alternative splicing, regulation, copy number analysis, and association studies, among other capabilities.
Last month, the firm signed a distribution agreement with Life Technologies subsidiary Ion Torrent under which Partek's Genomic Suite will be marketed by the instrumentation vendor as one of several software options for users of its Personal Genome Machine (BI 02/04/2011)
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