CDD – 8 years in the cloud. Really.

Our cloud based drug discovery software celebrates its 8th birthday

From the desk of Sylvia Ernst - CDD Sr. Director Community Growth

Yes – it is April 1^st – and yes – it is true. CDD was founded on April 1^st 2004 and started running a web-based database to join molecules with their many bioassay data.  The web is now “the cloud” and the CDD database is the “CDD Vault”. We are celebrating our 8^th birthday – but why should you read on?

Because CDD’s story is remarkable in many ways and there are lessons in it.

CDD was founded/spun-out of Eli Lilly by Barry Bunin while an Entrepreneur in Residence at Lilly. The vision was that in the near future drug discovery R&D would become too expensive and the drug discovery process would morph from being inside the 4 walls of an organization to the outside and become distributed. As Drug Discovery organizations become more virtual, they would need the collaborative tools to work in this distributed environment. Those tools therefore need to be on the web, easy to use from anywhere (without the help of IT) and collaborative.

Now in 2012 this is all real. CDD’s new clients are “demanding” Software as a Service, cloud and web.  In-house systems are seen as the exception and even a liability. Nobody wants to bother with hosting their own software and wasting resources. One of the most remarkable calls I had was with a few folks from government research projects. It went like that:

“CDD being hosted is more secure than our in-house system!”

“Huh? Why?” I asked.

“Because our internal security and testing is so complex that installing updates and bug fixes and upgrades is so slow that we are several versions on all our software behind.” (Sounds familiar?)

WOW.  Things have changed since April 1^st 2004!

Thank you!

There are always early adopters and visionary brilliant minds out there who see a path and walk it where others prefer to wait and sit back. So here is a toast and a thank you to our early customers who are visionary and brilliant – and believed in CDD long before the masses caught on.

Happy 1^st of April 2012.

This blog is authored by members of the CDD Vault community. CDD Vault is a hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both private and external biological and chemical data. It provides core functionality including chemical registration, structure activity relationship, chemical inventory, and electronic lab notebook capabilities!

CDD Vault: Drug Discovery Informatics your whole project team will embrace!