"Big pharma was standardised on Sun," said Augen, who left IBM at the end of 2002 to become chief executive of TurboWorx, a high-performance technical computing company. Although it was much a smaller and younger than IBM, he said, "Sun had a computational biology research group and was winning all the business" for high-powered servers that could handle immense amounts of data generated by life sciences research.
That proved difficult to change. IBM did get business from small biotech companies, Augen said, but "we needed to land some big deals."
What worked was identifying a relatively untapped customer arena: large academic medical research centres -- such as the Mayo Clinic, Duke University and the University of California at San Francisco -- looking to upgrade their IT infrastructures to become players in the post-genomic era. In targeting these customers, IBM could apply resources that neither Sun nor other competitors could match.
Mayo, in particular, was an early and important partner. In about two years of working together, IBM and the clinic have developed good rapport, said Dr. Nina Schwenk, an internist who heads the IT committee for the Mayo Foundation Board of Trustees. Both companies are major employers and had served together in community groups.
"We're two very different types of organisations," Schwenk said, so the first project was limited -- entering data into an electronic medical record -- to see if a business relationship between a nonprofit health care provider and the world's largest technology company was even feasible.
When it proved productive, the two embarked on a more ambitious project aptly named the "data trust," for getting patient genomic information into a database stripped of private information in a way that could still be useful for research purposes.
"This is a new frontier," Schwenk said, "so it's going to take us a few years to explore."
Talkback
IBM will throw their weight around, and make progress.