Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) and Surety, LLC, today announced that Maquet SA of Ardon, France, has purchased the Agilent OpenLAB ELN electronic lab notebook bundled with Surety's AbsoluteProof third-party, digital timestamping service. The combined solution bolsters Maquet's long-term ability to protect and legally defend the authenticity and ownership of its scientific intellectual property (IP).
Maquet, a major manufacturer of medical products, therapies and services for operating rooms and intensive care units, purchased the system to replace paper lab notebooks. To protect scientific intellectual property, Maquet personnel were regularly shuttling the notebooks to an off-site notary office to be manually time stamped. By implementing an automated digital notarization process, Maquet expects to streamline the efficiency and effectiveness of this process. The company says it was also seeking a tool to facilitate collaboration between research teams in France and Germany.
"OpenLAB ELN enables our customers to capture, manage and share their valuable research," said Bruce von Herrmann, vice president and general manager, Agilent Software and Informatics. "The seamless integration of AbsoluteProof secures corporate intellectual property at the time of inception, automating the documentation of when patents are submitted."
Agilent OpenLAB ELN provides scientists with a scalable, integrated platform for creating, capturing, managing and sharing information in an increasingly complex global environment. The open-architecture, customizable solution facilitates multi-discipline interaction, simplifies and accelerates R&D discovery, and streamlines data management. OpenLAB ELN v4.1 introduces experimental templates, enabling scientists to customize the view the experimental desktop.
Agilent also has streamlined the analytical request workflow by reducing the number of steps between request and result, which dramatically improves lab productivity. A specific analytical module for documenting analytical methods, generating sequence files and capturing results has been added to facilitate report creation across one or more samples and techniques.
AbsoluteProof digitally time stamps research data flowing within the OpenLAB ELN, providing substantial evidentiary support should the authenticity or ownership of timestamped records be legally challenged. A secure digital time stamp (i.e., trusted timestamp) verifiably seals a record, enabling its time and content integrity to be independently proven at any time. Additionally, researcher identity is captured and sealed alongside the content during the collaboration workflow, increasing the defensibility of the overall "sign and witness" process. No other commercially available ELN offers such long-term, scientific intellectual property protection.
About Surety, LLC
Founded in 1994 by leading Bellcore Scientists, Surety is a leading third-party, trusted timestamp authority in the bio-pharma and R&D markets. With millions of research-oriented electronic records and files worldwide protected under its authenticity Seal, the company's flagship service offering AbsoluteProof® enables organizations to meet the legal, fiduciary and regulatory responsibilities associated with creating, managing and archiving electronic records, files and data by providing legally-defensible evidence of data integrity and authenticity. AbsoluteProof ensures against content tampering by providing a "digital wax seal" for all types of electronically stored content. The company's client base is made up of R&D-heavy pharmaceutical and bio-technology companies, legal and financial services firms, healthcare organizations, Cloud-computing service providers and copyright protection agencies that are ensuring record integrity with AbsoluteProof. For more information, visit www.surety.com.
About Agilent Technologies
Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is the world's premier measurement company and a technology leader in chemical analysis, life sciences, electronics and communications. The company's 18,500 employees serve customers in more than 100 countries. Agilent had net revenues of $4.5 billion in fiscal 2009. Information about Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.
