Accelrys HEOS® Goes Live on BT Cloud Environment

Accelrys, Inc., a leading provider of scientific innovation lifecycle management software, today announced that the cloud-based Accelrys HEOS® information management and collaboration workspace is now live on BT for Life Sciences R&D cloud platform. BT for Life Sciences R&D provides a secure, reliable and scalable cloud environment for HEOS users, enabling more efficient and productive networked collaboration by pharmaceutical research organizations and their partners. The latest engagement between BT and Accelrys furthers the relationship on hosting and externalization that has been in place between the companies since April 2012, while strengthening the enterprise capabilities of the Accelrys Externalized Collaboration Suite announced today at Bio-IT World. Combined with the enterprise cloud infrastructure provided by BT, the Accelrys Externalized Collaboration Suite addresses the needs of research organizations transitioning to an externalized network research environment.

“With the pharmaceutical industry moving rapidly to a network research model, organizations are struggling to provide secure, real-time information exchange and intellectual property (IP) protection across externalized networks,” said Dr. Matt Hahn, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Accelrys. “Accelrys and BT recognize the need for drug discovery research organizations to collaborate effectively within a secure, reliable, global cloud infrastructure as they move to this new model.”

“BT’s robust Life Sciences for R&D cloud service is essential to meeting the critical business issues raised by externalized network research today,” said Bas Burger, president of Global Pharmaceutical & Chemical for BT Global Services. “Combining Accelrys HEOS and other Accelrys applications for externalized research as part of BT for Life Sciences R&D enables scientists working in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as academia and government, to collaborate effectively in a cloud environment. The platform is designed to allow customers to comply with the industry’s stringent security, regulatory and compliance requirements.”

As part of the Accelrys Externalized Collaboration Suite, Accelrys HEOS is a proven Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workspace that accelerates collaborative drug discovery. The system provides secure, real-time cloud access to data about such things as chemical registration, biological assay results, computational and visual analytics, safety assessment and pharmacokinetics data, and other project information. This material can be accessed with greatly reduced effort and IT overhead. Accelrys HEOS enables pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, contract research organizations, academic institutions and other partnering research organizations to access critical information, share results and make informed decisions in a timely manner with all IP stored in a secure, project-specific information warehouse.

BT for Life Sciences R&D was developed as a secure and segregated platform, using BT Cloud Compute. It allows scientists to construct and orchestrate in silico workflows and data pipelines so that new pharmaceutical targets and drug candidates can be identified. This platform, launched at Bio-IT World 2012, enables research scientists to create global project groups and collaborate using social media tools. This ecosystem allows them to securely upload documents, share results and communicate via instant messaging (IM), voice, video or chat. They can also analyze results in an environment that segments data and uses qualified hardware components and workflows specific to the pharmaceutical industry.