The Golden Age of Biotech and IT

I was very interested to read that J. Craig Venter and his colleagues created the first synthetic cell a couple weeks ago. It is the seed of a new and second Tree of Life. Dr. Venter described the cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” According to articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Science, synthetic cells open many possibilities for creating biofuels and vaccines.  I think we are entering a new “golden age” of scientific research and products with this discovery. I think we are also entering a “golden age” of computing, as our devices and web-based services change our lives for the better.

Bob Evans, senior VP and director of InformationWeek’s Global CIO unit, thinks a golden age of IT has begun. In this excellent article, he lists six reasons:

• IT vendors are delivering new capabilities that streamline IT and provide new opportunities in analytics, real-time operations and decision-making, mobility, and cloud computing.
• The age of CIO as “high priest” is over.
• In the past few months, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP have launched specific programs aimed at helping CIOs build their way out of the old, brittle, inflexible, and expensive IT infrastructures they’ve cobbled together over the past 10-20 years.
• The rise of predictive analytics: never before in the history of the tech business has so much predictive power been brought to bear on business problems, operational dilemmas, customer behavior and preferences, supply-chain optimization, and more.
• The rise of real-time computing that will in turn fuel real-time production planning and real-time decisions on pricing, merchandising, routing, inventory optimization, and financial operations.
• Mobile is the new desktop.

For a deeper dive on the way analytics is transforming business and IT decision-making, read Rob Preston’s related article, “Down to Business: Analytics for Every Action.”

It is exciting to watch so many improvements occurring at this time in biotech and in IT. These products are helping CIOs and line-of-business managers improve their operations and their decision-making to usher in the golden age of IT:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

What do you plan to do with cloud-based systems to create a golden age of IT and decision-making at your organization?