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Gulf Coast Consortia Signs Five-Year Software Licensing Agreement with Accelrys

By Rachel Ramsey, TMCnet Web Editor

The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences signed a five-year licensing agreement with Accelrys, a scientific enterprise research and development software and services company. Software licensing relies on a legal instrument to determine how software can be used and redistributed, and is critical for application producers because it helps their customers stay in compliance, provides flexibility in monetizing products based on configurations, and allows for new licensing models such as Software-as-a-Service.

The investigators in the GCC chemical genomics (GCC-CG) program will have access to Accelrys’ software, which will be used to support multi-disciplinary collaborative research and training programs for the treatment and prevention of rare and undertreated cancers. The Accelrys Enterprise Platform provides a broad, flexible scientific solution optimized to integrate the diversity of science, experimental processes and information requirements across research, development, process scale-up and early manufacturing phases of product development.

The licensed software includes the enterprise-scalable Accelrys Enterprise Platform supporting multi-center, collaborative information sharing and scientific innovation across partnering research organizations. The system also includes Accelrys Pipeline Pilot, the cloud-based Accelrys HEOS drug discovery information management workspace, the Accelrys Discovery Studio modeling and simulation application, and Accelrys Biological Registration software.

Peter Davies, director and co-founder of GCC-CG, said with upward of thirty projects a year, GCC needs to work together efficiently and generate results quickly with minimal time and resources spent on internal software development.

“The ability to create Pipeline Pilot Web applications that can be freely shared with other academic researchers inside or outside the Consortia provides a significant collaboration and innovation benefit,” said Davies.

Pipeline Pilot enables scientists to rapidly create, test and publish scientific services that automate the process of accessing, analyzing and reporting scientific data, either for the scientist’s personal use or for sharing across the scientific community.

Software licensing is becoming a top criterion for choosing independent software vendors (ISVs) as enterprise technology environments enter a new transformative period characterized by the adoption of virtualization and the cloud. Three factors are driving IT managers to choose ISVs based on customers’ demands.