LabVantage, an affiliate of The Chatterjee Group is a laboratory information management systems (LIMS) major, has chalked an expansion plan to offices at either Hyderabad or Bangalore. The company's efforts to set-up an office either at Bangalore or Hyderabad will be based on the business driven evaluations.

In 2006 alone, the company went on to open facilities at Mumbai and Chennai part from setting base at Shanghai, Romania and south Asian countries. LabVantage Solutions Inc is based at New Jersey.

It was its partnership with SAP which allowed these foreign offices to open. In association with SAP, LabVantage has been able to ensure that its customers get the optimal advantage from SAP's NetWeaver platform integration with LIMS as an end-to-end solutions provider.

While several of LIMS customers are now exposed to SAP capabilities, it is the same in the case of SAP with its new offering of LIMS. This allows pharmaceutical and process chemistry users with an undue advantage to use the best in class software to enhance their business processes, Anil P Kastuar, president, Asia-Pacific, Lab Vantage Solutions Pvt. Ltd. said.

The company has two products and Sapphire is its flagship brand. While Sapphire has both out-of-the-box and customized solutions LV LIMS offers only out-of-the-box systems. The Sapphire enterprise connector certified for SAP NetWeaver integration accelerates time-to market products. It maintains data integrity across systems, facilitates data transfer and knowledge sharing, besides increases operational productivity between lab, manufacturer and corporate enterprise and enhances overall competitiveness through improved collaboration and information management system, explained Kastuar who was in Bangalore attend the SAP TechEd 2006 held at Whitefield.

The company's customer profile in the pharma sector includes Cipla and Nicholas in addition to a host of others. For Cipla and Nicholas Piramal its will use the Corporate Quality Control implementation. For the former, it will connect its 22 manufacturing plants with Sapphire LIMS which will allow easier access for customers, create efficient record systems for regulatory approvals and improve overall quality of the research projects. The installation period is within 22 months. For basic installation, company takes around two months. The cost of installation varies from project size to scope of implementation. The minimum cost is Rs. 25 lakh and the maximum is Rs. 5 crore. Further installation have also been made at Cryo cell in Chennai . Others include companies in Middle East and South East Asia.

The seven year-old LabVantage, has set up a Global Centre for Excellence in Kolkatta in 2004 where its team works on project deployment, development, implementation and testing for US and Europe offices of LabVantage. In India 80 percent of its team of 110 comprises technical experts and the balance marketing personnel. The company will add on another ten personnel to make the total to 120 by 2006 end.

The total value of the LIMS market globally in 2005 is around $300 million which includes homegrown and packaged versions. Out of this 15 percent of the market is for customers in Asia and the remaining is held by US and Europe. The market in Asia is growing at 20 percent and global market registers 10 percent annual growth.

The key strengths of LabVantage are innovation and cost effective solutions provided by qualified personnel with domain expertise. The focus is for business processing. The products are user- friendly, and timely implementation.

Currently competition is there and is 55 percent of this is from the homegrown LIMS segment and 12-15 percent in the packaged versions. The company is ranked second in terms of turnover globally and no other details were disclosed.

The perceptible trends in LIMS market is the scalability and flexibility to reconfigure software for long term support covering local and global operations..

Problems in the sector are that there is a serious lack of awareness among users. After crossing the barrier of conceptual selling the LabVantage has to focus on pricing issues, stated Kastuar.

The scene for LIMS holds immense potential. In Patent Regime with extensive research expansions, booming contract research projects, the lab market was on the upswing . There is a big demand for LIMS among chemistry and biotechno-logy research centres.