On April 30th, 2007, I went to the Oracle Life Sciences Users Group (OLSUG) conference in the fabulous World trade center in Boston. I never had any exposure to BIO IT before; I thought this is a good opportunity to know more about an interesting field. Indeed it is interesting to learn how intense the data mining requirements are for the Bio-informatics field. Most of the attendees have strong background in Biological research with a combination of IT exposure.
I had a chance to talk with a few presenters of the conference. What surprised me is their lack of enthusiasm for increasing the efficiency of their IT staff.
First of all they have large amounts of data, a few terabytes with multiple databases and multiple security and compliance requirements. I got sense that they have hard time pulling the information from several different sources and mine to help their research.
When I asked one of the conference presenters if they have a "process" of managing their databases and IT in general, The answer is, “well, my IT staff takes care of the issues” – mostly firefighting, takes forever to get anything implemented and put into production for real use.
I asked another question, do you remember what your DBA did for the past 30 days, other than those incidents of firefighting – an instantaneous NO with a grin.
When I asked would you rather know what your DBA’s have been fighting with and not pay thousands for Oracle Enterprise Manager? One presenter looked indifferent, as they have deep pockets. At the same time, they are worried about getting results from their research within the budget and within a time frame – a misalignment of IT and business (research) goals.
One of the presenter agreed that, their IT staff efficiency can be improved by 25% or more if we take care of their databases. Managed services can cut down the data management cost by 50% or less. This helps their existing DBA staff to channel their efforts in helping their research goals rather than dealing with day to day mundane data management tasks. The macro affect of this efficiency is much larger - faster adoption of technologies, more focus on their core business activities and processes.
Oracle presented Oracle Life Sciences Platform - I did not see any specific technologies that help Life Sciences; all the technology features they presented are generic features of Oracle 10g like InterMedia, Text, Indexing, RAC, Dataguard, Warehouse Builder, Statistical functions, etc.