Rich Lysakowski Director of R&D and Informatics CENSA, Inc.

“From my vantage point as the industry leader responsible for ELN market engineering for 20 years, Rescentris and their CERF informatics framework software provide several unique capabilities to scientific organizations.  These are security, powerful search, and simplicity for users. 

As a software vendor, Rescentris’ has a truly unique commitment to meet users needs for “how data are protected and accessed across time and space”.  Intellectual Property (IP) and data created by ELNs often must be kept authentic and fully accessible for 40+ years with no additional future cost.  This requires commitments by ELN software vendors that do not exist for most other R&D software.  Planned obsolescence and expensive migration services that are so prevalent in other industries are simply unacceptable for IP created by ELNs, because continual migration is dangerous and risky for IP and supporting data.  Specific vendor commitments required are to provide secure, perpetual, and data access for records and supporting data archives created by ELNs, and to do this by providing portable data archives that free of expensive migration services.  From the start Rescentris designed the CERF technology for full data portability, sustainability, and perpetual access to ELN records and data. 

CERF’s seamless and transparent interface to Iron Mountain’s Records Management Services is unique from a legal perceptive, because it offers stronger trusted third-party assurance than in-house methods.  ELNs should never be used as Records Management or Data Archival Systems, because the turnover and volatility of the R&D software markets is high and getting worse.  In my opinion, buyers can trust ELN suppliers to provide excellent R&D-specific capabilities, but not enterprise-level capabilities like Electronic Records Management or Archival Storage Systems.  R&D software vendors must keep their focus on anticipating the rapidly changing needs of scientific R&D, not trying to become enterprise software vendors.  If R&D software vendors do R&D software poorly, everyone loses because support of science falters.  Rescentris’ unique collaboration with Iron Mountain focuses on advancing science.

CERF has crucial Semantic Web capabilities to index and search data from fast-changing scientific “mega-disciplines” like modern biology where standards committees may take decades to catch up to the state of the art.   CERF’s content management system embeds the World Wide Web Consortium’s OWL and RDF semantic data standards to help scientific organizations support “rapid knowledge evolution” with much less effort than conventional object-relational DBMS systems.   This is crucial because lean organizations cannot afford high maintenance controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, or data catalogs to keep large indexes fast and accurate for searching.   CERF’s semantic indexing capabilities are crucial for modern science; semantic-based indexing simply cannot be retrofitted. 

Finally, CERF transparently integrates Microsoft tools and standards to leverage users’ enormous learning investments.   At the same time CERF leverages huge global investments in open source software such as JAVA and other technologies.  This increases leverage for systems engineering teams and accelerates delivery of higher quality solutions.  The bottom line is better pricing, usability, and sustainability for buyers.   Combined with Rescentris’ highly personalized customer service means CERF ELN software solutions are very high value for customers.”

Dr. Lysakowski is the Director of R&D and Principal Consultant for CENSA, Inc.  CENSA is the leading consultancy and market research and development firm focused on ELNs and advanced R&D informatics for analytical and life sciences.  Dr. Lysakowski’s responsibilities include engineering and applying complete and forward-looking ELNs systems and other informatics solutions, and making R&D informatics markets better.  He helps buyers to specify and implement the right solutions to meet their needs better, and helps vendors to respond, build, and sell the right products better.  His mission is to accelerate progress in R&D software markets, so that scientific discoveries and developments happen with increasing quality and velocity.