What led to the creation of SciY and what led to the collaboration of various companies under the SciY umbrella?
The creation of SciY stems from our understanding that our focus industries, such as biopharma, chemical and related industries, are ripe for automation at a set of stages in the value chain, and that this automation starts with and will be built on digitization. The idea was to create a hub that offers customers a comprehensive suite of scientific software solutions. Different platforms came together under the SciY umbrella with a shared vision to combine their expertise and operations to create a vendor agnostic software brand. SciY aims to provide integrated solutions for the entire life sciences value chain by developing innovative and modular software suites tailored to the specific needs of different customers. Our decision to partner was driven by a commitment to data stewardship, maximizing the value of data, supporting digitization and ultimately helping customers automate.
How does SciY define its mission?
Our mission is to empower life sciences to accelerate innovation, time to market and commercialization through automation and digitization. At SciY, we believe that every bit of scientific data matters. We ensure efficient storage, management and extraction of data value for our customers.
This is where the various businesses that make up SciY come into play. ZONTAL and LOGS provide high-quality annotation, making data FAIR (Findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) and AI ready, along with in-depth processing and analysis by Mestrelab. Our commitment spans chemistry, biochemistry and biology, influencing research, development and manufacturing decisions.
Working with companies like Optimal Industrial Technologies and Optimal Industrial Automation, we are driven to automate processes and accelerate progress. We also include Arxspan in our business, a fully integrated cloud platform for scientific data management designed to dramatically improve collaborative research.
Could you elaborate on the synergies SciY aims to create between its businesses? How does this facilitate collaboration and innovation for customers?
Seamless integration between disparate software and hardware is critical for many customers, as it is often impossible to source data analytics equipment or solutions from a single company. SciY creates synergies between businesses by developing the necessary bridges between individual components to create a complete workflow. In this regard, we have over 600 integrations with different hardware and software solutions, a number that is constantly growing based on demand.
The benefit to customers is that they can now benefit from a single integrated platform, simplifying purchasing, training and usage and receiving customer support from a single source. In addition to being able to use data to control processes or quality in new ways and create new methods of automation, synergistic platforms also help reduce complexity. This frees up time for customers to better focus on their own R&D, sales or other activities, rather than the cumbersome approach of managing complex and disparate software and hardware.
SciY helps achieve this with its highly multidisciplinary team, who can support customers in finding the right, bespoke solution. SciY has a 24/7 customer support structure and the breadth of expertise to understand the challenges customers face, whether their industry is life science or chemistry.
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What role does SciY envision itself playing in the broader industrial landscape?
Automation is a key part of Industry 4.0 development, but to achieve automation in the research lab or manufacturing plant, you need highly advanced design and feedback systems.
The feedback system must include a sensor or measurement tool that verifies whether a product conforms to standards and environmental conditions are properly maintained. In addition, it should have a feedback control system that can adjust the experimental conditions or production processes to assess their impact on the result.
Finally, once the diagnostic measurements are made, a data analysis process must be performed to evaluate the relationship between the changes the feedback system has made and the new results for process optimization.
Maximizing the potential of scientific data generated by instruments can significantly improve automation and customer productivity. However, making full use of this data is not straightforward. It involves the integration of data from multiple instruments, sensors and software environments and the development of automated routines for experimental design and data analysis. These steps are necessary to transform raw data into actionable insights that drive efficiency and innovation.
Our role will be to connect physical sensors across the entire value chain, from Research to Manufacturing and QC, to the enterprise software that drives our customers’ businesses, helping them improve their productivity and quality and bring products to market faster. We will also attempt to collect, annotate, preserve and prepare all data generated in the process so that it can be used by artificial intelligence, data analysis, visualization and other process optimization efforts. In this way, we will achieve full digitization and automation of our customers’ workflows.
About the speaker
Santi is President of SciY. He is an experienced entrepreneur specializing in the creation and creation of technology companies, developing shareholder value with the ultimate goal of strategic exits or other liquidity events.
He is passionate about impacting the world around him by building companies that make a significant difference to the wealth of our shareholders, communities and environment.
About “SciY” 
SciY is a software brand that provides a wide range of scientific software solutions across the spectrum of life sciences. SciY is a concept developed by Bruker BioSpin that resulted from collaborative efforts with various brand-neutral software partners, including Mestrelab, Arxspan, Optimal Industrial Technologies, Optimal Industrial Automation and ZONTAL.
Fueled by a shared progressive business vision and the need to recognize the benefits and added value of a unified market presence and diversified brand portfolio, these partners united their individual businesses under a collective brand – SciY, housed in the newly established Integrated division Data Solutions Division of the Bruker BioSpin Group.
SciY unifies all current vendor-agnostic software platforms and solution brands and will include future innovations resulting from this collaborative synergy. A key motivation for SciY is to create new and innovative, modular software solution platforms, meticulously tailored to meet the specific needs of their target markets and applications, and to facilitate digitization and automation efforts in the laboratory.