Small companies with less than one percent market share dominate the BioIT industry, which is expected to grow to US$30 billion by 2006 in the Asia-Pacific region. The fledgling BioIT industry has emerged as a result of heightening demand for information technology designed to enable research in the life sciences.
In the software space, the largest player is Oracle, with 16 percent market share. Vendors that control less than one percent of the market take up 59 percent of the pie.
"Plus, a lot of bioinformaticists (those who use IT to enable biological research) aren't easily influenced by brand," Fersht told ZDNet Australia . "They're very much best-of-breed people, they'll buy little software packages from different companies if it's the best at doing the job they want."
"They're always looking around at new things, so it ends up being like having three e-mail accounts," said Fersht, explaining many companies had multiple applications running that did effectively the same thing.
According to Fersht, there is a big opportunity for good software applications, especially data integration and data management. However, he warned the most important aspect of succeeding in the BioIT space was to not bombard the prospective clients with technology. "Build a solution which aligns with the problems of that company," he said.
Lionel Binns, the worldwide life sciences manager for Hewlett Packard, agreed that BioIT represents a good opportunity for small companies because the cost of entry is small. However, he did warn a lot of large pharmaceutical companies were cutting research and development budgets at the moment, as a response to "the blip in the economy".
Fersht and Binns gave presentations at "Australia's BioIT Market: Understanding the Future", a briefing used to promote IDC's latest paper, "Australia and New Zealand's Bio-IT Ecosystem".
