Spotfire Delivers Spotfire Pro, Related Services Through the Web
Spotfire Forum is a free, Web-based collaborative portal for scientific and technical decision-makers. The portal leverages the open nature of the Web to facilitate the exchange of ideas and encourage innovative approaches to discovery, development, manufacture, marketing of chemical products. The Forum offers users free downloadable plug-ins, free downloadable analytical methodologies and templates, and threaded discussion capabilities.
In addition, Spotfire Forum offers Spotfire customers eSupport, Spotfire's Web-based customer service offering. It offers registered subscribers: remote installation assistance, a personalized support web page, 24x7 knowledge-base support, an electronic enhancement and defect tracking system, electronic software and documentation distribution, FAQs, and direct access to Spotfire's support team.
New Spotfire Pro Release
Spotfire has also released Spotfire Pro 4.2, the latest version of its flagship discovery product currently used at each of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies worldwide as well as major biotech, agrichemical, chemical, and manufacturing companies. Spotfire Pro reads multi-variable data originating from disparate data sources, automatically generating intelligent, interactive query devices for rapid identification of trends, anomalies, outliers, and patterns. Spotfire Pro is based on technology developed by Spotfire founder Christopher Ahlberg while he was a grad student at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. This release enables Spotfire Pro customers to directly access Spotfire Forum—the company's collaborative portal—and eSupport, Spotfire's new Web-based customer support offering.
"Spotfire Pro enables scientists, engineers, and product managers to access and analyze data from disparate sources so that they can make more accurate decisions," Ahlberg said. "By delivering new offerings over the Web, we can provide a faster and easier way for customers to obtain the mission-critical tools they need to be successful. This is the first Web-based product to provide a collaborative framework connecting individuals to a broader array of tools and information, while also connecting individuals to one another across the extended enterprise. Spotfire Pro speeds effective decision-making across the entire product value chain—an absolute necessity to getting products to market first."
Spotfire Pro makes it easy to find compounds that meet specified criteria by using range sliders to filter initial data by identifying properties by color, shape, and rotation.
Spotfire Pro has thus far been marketed to drug discovery scientists. However, Spotfire marketing manager Louise Bono claims the software is applicable to any chemical database supporting process operations, production, scaleup, manufacturing, or safety. Enhancements to Pro over the next few months will make the product even more useful to process engineers.
"Spotfire Pro imports information from any chemical database," Bono said. "Imagine testing, analysis, process, pilot plant, or other engineering situations that generate large amounts of data. If decisions are made based on that data, Spotfire Pro can help."
Despite its reputation as a research-software company, Spotfire is gearing up to take on the process side of pharmaceutical and chemical industries. On February 7, Spotfire entered a partnership with process software specialist Aspen Technology Inc. to provide process analytics capabilities to chemical manufacturing engineers using Aspen's process software products. With the Spotfire software enhancement Aspen customers can combine data from batch events, batch characteristics, and batch process variable trajectories. They can then visually explore and analyze the data to gain a better understanding of the trends and relationships in the data, overlaying data from previous batch runs to interpret what the differences are and explore why they occur. The solution will be configured to each customer's specific workflows in batch monitoring and quality improvement.
For more information: Louise Bono, Marketing Communications Manager, Spotfire, Inc., 60 Hampshire St., Cambridge, MA 02139. Tel: 617-621-0340. Fax: 617-621-0381.
By Angelo DePalma