The Motley Fool thinks Web Browser Based LIMS is a good idea!
Posted by: John H. Jones – President of LABLynx, Inc.
Perhaps you have never heard of the Motley Fool??? Well it is both a newspaper column and a web site that covers personal financial issues and investments. The nice thing about the Fool is that it provides a humorous look at financial matters but also provides a pragmatic look at money and investments. Today I read the Motley Fool and they were talking about the recent StarLIMS IPO. You can read the full story here.
One thing I found most interesting was the fact that they too think that a Web Browser Based LIMS makes a lot of since and is strategically sound. We at LABLynx have thought so for the past 10 years when we introduced the FIRST web browser based LIMS in 1997. We never thought that it was worth an IPO however.
Here is what the Motley Fool had to say:
“Like the fast-growing Salesforce.com, STARLIMS was smart to make its software Web-based. This is important because its customers are global and need to centralize data. It improves the accuracy of the analysis as well as regulatory compliance.”
It is interesting to note that StarLIMS is the only pure LIMS company that is publicly traded. I like LIMS a lot but I really do not see it as a high growth industry. My personal thought is that the industry does not make a good investment for a public traded stock. Now as a private investment, I think it is great. As a privately held LIMS company we don’t have to fear competition from public companies that have a far greater amount of overhead to sustain; Sarbanes-Oxley is just the start of headaches for a private company gone public. I think this IPO puts StarLIMS in no-mans-land between public traded companies like Thermo and private LIMS companies. Time will tell if this move was good for investors and customers. It is too late for StarLIMS to go in reverse on this. The horse is now out of the barn.
