IDBS Acquires InforSense to Provide End-to-End Solutions for Research & Development Data Management

Guildford, UK, June 26, 2009 – IDBS, a leading provider of innovative data management solutions to multinational R&D organizations, today announced that it has concluded an unconditional agreement to acquire InforSense Ltd (InforSense), a company providing award-winning scientific and business intelligence (BI) technologies, in an all-cash transaction. The acquisition will complete in July.

R&D organizations in the public and private sectors rely upon their ability to capture, integrate and interpret their data. This is increasingly hampered by the explosion in volume and diversity of data available to scientists, the global scale of modern R&D activities and the requirement for data to be accessed and searched in context. InforSense’s rapid data integration technologies and web-based interactive analytics perfectly complement IDBS’ strong suite of secure, context-rich data management solutions. This transaction creates a unique supplier who can deliver the entire capture, integration and decision-making infrastructure for R&D organizations worldwide.

With the addition of the InforSense product portfolio, IDBS will expand its large scale data integration activities to support international data sharing and broaden its life sciences portfolio into the emerging growth area of biomarker development and personalized medicine. The InforSense brand, its products and partnerships will continue to be vigorously developed, marketed and supported around the world.

IDBS, a private company headquartered in the UK and with offices worldwide, provides a range of scalable, secure and searchable data management solutions that support the collection, integration and retrieval of high value data. IDBS’ solutions are designed to manage highly diverse scientific data and processes, and are deployed to a broad customer base across a wide range of sectors including; life sciences, academia, consumer products, material sciences, food technology and energy; they are also used within regulated environments in both pharmaceuticals and manufacturing. IDBS’ solutions provide rigorous data storage and promote the collection of contextual data, which is required to make scientific data relevant and comparable. The company is a trusted partner of large multinational R&D companies and has been the regular recipient of numerous awards, including the Queen’s Award for Enterprise and Innovation.

InforSense is a private company with offices in London (UK), Boston (USA) and Shanghai (PRC), and was founded in 1999 to develop and commercialize pioneering technology in the fields of high performance computing, and large scale data mining, originally developed at Imperial College, London. InforSense’s core expertise lies in the development of high performance business and scientific intelligence and in web-based reporting applications that are highly differentiated from standard BI tools by their capacity, rapid implementation and configurability. InforSense applications provide the framework for integrating data from an extremely broad range of data sources, for many multinational organizations from pharmaceuticals to finance. InforSense has also developed state of the art applications to integrate genomics, biomarker and clinical data, that provide a unique offering to researchers in the developing areas of translational and personalized medicine. InforSense’s founder, Professor Yike Guo will take up the role of Chief Innovation Officer at IDBS.

Neil Kipling, CEO and founder of IDBS said, “IDBS has a powerful vision to provide complete data infrastructures for R&D organizations in commercial and academic endeavour. Our existing domain expertise and twenty-year track record is enhanced by the acquisition of InforSense, whose leadership and technologies are globally recognized. This is a major enabling step towards becoming the number one informatics partner of R&D worldwide. An additional facet of this acquisition is the opportunity to cement a strategic informatics research relationship with Imperial College. The combination of our rigorous software development and powerful new research capabilities creates a groundbreaking new organization.”

Mr John O’Connell, Chairman of InforSense said, “As Chairman I am delighted to see InforSense become part of a visionary software company with proven expertise in the life sciences domain. The market can only react positively to the emergence of the first single end-to-end R&D informatics solution provider. This acquisition has been enabled by the vision and commitment of founder and CTO, Professor Yike Guo, and by the strong leadership of our management team, under our CEO David Bennett, and is good news for InforSense customers, shareholders and staff”.

This announcement comes shortly after IDBS announced the agreement with the University of Cambridge (UK) under which IDBS is to provide data management solutions to the Department of Chemistry, to improve data sharing across its broad network of academic groups in the UK and elsewhere, and marks the start of an ongoing informatics collaboration that will provide leading-edge technologies for commercialization.