Commercial Open Source Support

Lowering the risk

Innovative translational medicine software is available from a number of open source projects initiatives and institutions contributing components of their custom projects to the medical community. While many organizations seek to leverage the products from these projects, they are often hindered because of the risks in using a platform with no vendor or financial model to support the technology. At Recombinant By Deloitte we have worked to address the void and provide a solution suite around popular open source frameworks to help deliver a packaged and professional solution. Our support services wrap around the technology to improve reliability and reduce project risks.

Recombinant By Deloitte open source services include:

• Tool selection through prototypes and pilots
• Leading practice implementation project planning
• Packaged adapters to communicate between tools
• Installation, configuration, and integration development services
• Custom development of extensions or plugins
• Bug fix / incident support level agreements (SLAs)
• Training courses and materials - developer and end-users
• Hosting of collaboration tools - bug tracking, version control, wiki, discussion forums
• Software intend and indemnification to reduce risk

At Recombinant By Deloitte we collaborate with teams producing open source tools to be able to deliver first line consulting and support traditionally provided by a software product vendor. Since we are committed to the model of community development, much of the work we complete within open source projects is contributed back to the community. We also focus our development efforts to avoid source code forks that could damage community development. Our model for commercial open source support, especially because it is involved in scientific endeavors, embraces the ideas expressed in the Beekeeper model where our responsibility is to support both customers and the non-customer community and not favor one over the other. Community members do not need to be Recombinant By Deloitte customers to make a meaningful contribution to the overall effectiveness of products, and customers are able to choose the level of commercial support they would like from Recombinant By Deloitte. They simply need to adopt the tools to the leading of their ability and contribute what they can back to the community.

Example Projects

• Customization of i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) workbench and lucine search engine at a major pharma organization within a biomarker discovery data warehouse

• Grant funded collaboration to launch i2b2 across 4 sites using the Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE)

• Installation of i2b2 at a major medical school to support clinical research

Open Source support is available for:

i2b2 Cells

- Clinical research chart
- Workbench (Eclipse and Web)
- Ontology Mapper
- SHRINE federation

Messaging

- Mirth

Base Application Frameworks

- Pentaho
- JFreeChart
- extJS
- Lucine search engine

Genomics/Analysis

- GenePattern
- geWorkbench

Useful Open Source Concepts

- Cathedral and the Bazaar Book