It’s been a week since we announced that we will start offering our scientific data management platform, grit, free and open source. And the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

The number of people - ranging from big pharma to the smallest geeky research startup -  that have reached out for a chat about the possibilities is far beyond what I had expected.

Putting all modesty aside, we know that it is an attractive package. We will now offer a "structure-aware enterprise level data warehouse" as our long term collaborator Dr. Phil Gribbon from Fraunhofer ITMP calls it - free and downloadable from the website. Compared to the normal cost for a per-user license for this kind of software the savings is substantial.

But I don’t think the money matters that much, actually.

The purchase process is the problem

Having been part of the drug discovery software business for quite some time, I think the huge interest indicates something else. 

The thing is, the people that contact me are the researchers who have the needs for a structured data store, the data scientists who need to analyse the data or other scientists from research organisations. It's not corporate IT, research informatics, purchasing or other “non-user” departments of the companies.

I’ve heard it before and this underlines the point. The need for software is absolutely there and there are a number of users who would love to have a structured data store to keep their results for longer term storage and further analysis.

But just thinking about going through a purchase process makes them tired.  

The process of explaining their needs to IT. 

The process of describing everything in minute details so that purchasing can "run an RFP process" with numbered requirements which will be ancient and obsolete by the time they see any software. 

The process of dealing with annoying and do-not-understand-a-no salespeople who, let's be honest, have a slight tendency to overdo the brilliance of their software.

And not least the process of securing priority and budget. 

So they give up in advance.

Now we offer an opportunity to get started immediately. For free. 

It may not be perfect or everything they have dreamt of, but it’s a solid starting point and a way to get off the ground quickly and then enhance the solution down the road. 

And more importantly, they can do so without involving the entire corporate circus. 

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From this first week of people contacting us with tangible project proposals, it definitely looks like this approach is appealing to many. 

Given this initial interest, we’ll work hard on getting the open source platform ready for download as quickly as possible. Sign up here, if you want to get a notification when we’re there.