University partnership will greatly improve computer system

03 Feb 2011

Eagle Genomics Ltd. has signed a collaboration agreement with The University of Manchester to provide commercial support for Taverna, the open-source Workflow Management System.

The partnership will see Eagle Genomics take on responsibility for providing commercial support for Taverna. Users of Taverna will benefit from an increased range and quality of support options, whilst Taverna’s developers will be able to focus on developing innovative new features for the Taverna product line.

Taverna, part of the myGrid family of projects, is a computer program for designing and executing workflows. Workflows represent scientific experiments and form a key part of biological research as scientists connect together a series of steps to transform their research data into knowledge.

Taverna’s open-source nature allows it to be deployed universally without restriction and at no financial cost, providing scientists with easy access to a high-quality and well-regarded workflow tool.

The Taverna team’s focus on bioinformatics has helped Taverna become the workflow system of choice for scientists in life science labs around the world.

The Taverna team at the University has been awarded Manchester EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account funding to support their interaction with Eagle Genomics.

The aim of the engagement is to aid Eagle Genomics in the creation of commercial grade support offerings based around the Taverna products.

As a result the company will be able to confidently and expertly provide technical support, customised additions and user training focused on industrial needs. The ongoing collaboration between Eagle Genomics and the University will ensure that they will work together on the Taverna products and do not duplicate efforts.

Professor Carole Goble, of The University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science, said “The partnership with Eagle is an exciting opportunity to make Taverna tools a viable and supported part of the commercial software ecosystem. Researchers will also benefit from the commercial grading of Taverna by it being able to efficiently handle larger amounts of data”.

Abel Ureta-Vidal, CEO of Eagle Genomics Ltd., said “This is a great opportunity to demonstrate Eagle Genomics’ continued engagement with academic institutions to help spread the impact of the world-class bioinformatics research done in the UK. At the same time, customers can invest in the use of the Taverna workflow management system with peace of mind, knowing that they can get professional support from a company that was set up to solve their specific issues.”